


Love Bites

by adlyb



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Blood Play, Body Horror, Canon Typical Violence, F/M, I know rare for me right, Secret affairs, Unrequited longing, Vampire Elena Gilbert, biting kink, but Elena is really difficult to help?, honestly Klaus is trying?, self-hate sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-09-23 15:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17082995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adlyb/pseuds/adlyb
Summary: When Elena has trouble adjusting to life as a vampire, Klaus, for reasons of his own, takes her under his wing. Clandestine meetings, blood sharing, and some very confused feelings ensue.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a short little holiday project. Daily small updates until finished.

 

 

 

The thing of it is, this is supposed to be straightforward. The girl has werewolf venom in her veins, and his blood is the only cure. He wants the girl to live, so that he can make her alive again. That should be it.

For some reason, he offers her his blood directly from his wrist.

It’s hardly as though he’s never done this before. He’s enjoyed this particular activity many, _many_ times, as it were in point of fact. It’s just that he’s never done this with a woman in possession of _that_ face.

So it is that Klaus has to grit his teeth against the feeling of Elena Gilbert’s fangs pressing into his wrist as she drinks hungrily from his exposed vein. The tip of one of her razored canines scrapes against his ulna. The sensation sends shivers down his spine. The newborn predator beneath her skin senses it, growls against his wrist and yanks him closer. His cock twitches in his jeans. 

Taken with the brazenness of the girl, with her face that he has dreamed of for a millennium and with her blood-smeared lips and sharp white teeth, he allows himself to be spooled in closer. The ease of his acquiescence to her appetite gives him pause. He had come here ready to secure an asset. Strictly speaking, he’s already accomplished that. A cursory glance reveals her color to have improved and the sweating sickness to have abated. Really, they should have finished long seconds before. But he is, quite unexpectedly, finding himself enjoying this rather a lot.  Any desire to keep this purely transactional deserts him completely as she draws him close to her.

Behind him, Stefan peers over his shoulder, carefully monitoring, assuring himself that this is purely clinical. It’s not. The girl’s not even in her right mind, her brain probably already half way to fevered mush, and still Klaus can feel this situation spiraling out of his control.

Elena moans against him, her breath hot against his flesh. The vague desire stirring within him sharpens abruptly into a bolt of raw lust.

He really has never had any carnal designs upon her in the past. True, he’d been attracted to her, in the days leading up to the sacrifice and most especially when he finally, _finally_ held her in his arms for what he’d assumed to be the final embrace. And there had been the memorable shock of seeing her alive again, and a few odd episodes wherein she had impressed him with her bravery and her machinations that looked a lot like honor but were really just brutal survival. And he can never forget her face—no, that face is like a curse, slipping itself into his mind and molding itself to his every susceptibility even when he would _rather_ forget about it.

But he hasn’t lain awake at night thinking of Elena, eager for their next duel, or even lingering too much on all the small conflagrations between them in the past. He’s never thought of her too much at all, save for how he might use her. It’s why he finds it so shocking that he really does desire her.

She tugs hungrily on his arm and he wants very much to surrender to the sensation of her. But surrender—he can never do that.

He takes the opportunity to reestablish his dominance over her when he settles on the bed next to her. His superior strength keeps her pinned against him as she eagerly takes what she needs from him and more. Her mouth sucks at his wrist, and he watches her throat work as his ancient blood, potent beyond imagining, pours into that singularly bewitching body.

At the foot of the bed, Stefan paces. Were it anyone else in the room, Klaus might find the third presence a trifling inconvenient. As it is merely Stefan, his wayward brother, but a brother all the same, he finds himself mostly able to forgive the intrusion. He pushes him out of his mind.

Klaus soothes a strand of hair back from Elena’s face while she nurses against his wrist, her tongue prodding into the wound to keep it open. His fingers tighten in her hair.

He could probably have her after this. She’ll be wild out of her mind, high on his blood, eager to do anything he asks of her.

“She’s done, Klaus,” Stefan breaks in before Klaus can think what to do with the blood-addled girl in his arms.

Elena ignores her lover. Her teeth clamp against Klaus’s bone, her hands like claws curling around his hand and arm. If any other fledgling vampire had dared cling to him so limpet-like, he would take her arm off. He’s done it before, more than once.

But in this case, he finds himself, reluctantly, prying her off of him. Elena settles back against the mounds of pillows piled high in Stefan’s bed with an empty, blissed-out look upon her face. “I think she’s overcooked,” Klaus comments as, with great restraint, he steps away. He turns to Stefan. “You’d do well to keep her out of further danger. Should any harm come to her, I’ll take it as a personal mark against you.”

Stefan grabs his arm. “What do you mean by that? What interest could you possibly have in her now?”

Klaus throws him a smirk designed to rattle him. “I think we’ll leave that little revelation for another time.”

Behind them, Elena calls out. “Stefan?”

Predictable though it is, he finds himself uncharacteristically annoyed.

 

 

 

His head clears as soon as he is out of the room. Without the tactile experience of Elena, without the feel of her fangs in him and the sensation of his blood and power passing into her and the needy way she’d moaned against his skin, he finds himself unable to say what it was about her that had affected him so.

Really, he much prefers Miss Forbes.

Because tasting the girl on a whim would unnecessarily complicate things. Better to simply cure the girl and get on with building his army of hybrids.

He resolves then, as he lets himself into the empty mansion he’d built in hopes of at last residing there with his family, that he would put his momentary attraction to doe-eyed Elena out of his mind entirely.

And _really_ , he does.

 

 

 

He does not realize that this lapse is not _the only time_ , but rather what he will later come to think of as _the first time_. 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

 

The next time he sees Elena Gilbert, she’s slumped over a table at the Grill. Her long, dark hair pools around her, obscuring her face from him. It matters not. He can read her as clearly as he could see the stars in the night sky as a boy. Defeat slumps her shoulders, surrender bows her head. Every line of her body whispers of these twin disasters. He’s never known a Petrova to give up before, and it surprises him how much it disturbs him to see her this way.

Without quite consciously deciding to do it, he finds himself sliding into the booth bench across from her and saying, “Whatever it is that’s gotten you so down, it cannot possibly be so devastating as all that.”

Elena picks her forehead up from the table and stares at him. Apart from the other night, which hadn’t really counted, this is the first close look he’s really gotten of her since she turned. Without the venom-induced insanity distorting her features, he can see clearly what’s changed. There’s some essential spark missing from her eyes that had been there when she’d been mortal. Even the last time he saw her human, when she’d been tied-down and half-dead from blood loss, there’d been a palpable intensity to her, a fire that he could never quite douse. Death, it seems, has done the job for him.

“I nearly killed Matt tonight,” she tells him miserably. “I _wanted_ to kill him.”

He drums his fingers against the tabletop. He has no idea who _Matt_ is, exactly.  He’s not sure why he’s here, in this booth, for that matter, or what response would pull Elena out of her doldrums, or even why he has the urge to do just that. “Did you want to kill him?” he finally ventures. “It might perk you up if you did.”

In response, she throws the saltshaker at him.

He catches it neatly and rolls it under his hand, waiting. He doesn’t know what for.

“How do you deal?” she asks him.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

“With—with everything. The murder and the bloodshed and just—the existential horror of what we are.”

He shrugs. Easy. “You’re a vampire, sweetheart. There’s no horror when the leopard devours the lamb. It’s just what you _are_ , now.”

“I hate that.” She sounds so hollow, her voice like a gust of wind over barren plains. When she looks at him, he gets the impression that she doesn’t really see him at all.  

He can’t stand it. He would rather see her really dead than see her like this. Surely Katerina had never worn such cold and empty features?

“Why did you share your blood with me the other night?” she asks him abruptly. Her question derails him entirely.

“Well, you see, you were dying quite tragically from werewolf venom—“

“No, not—Don’t you usually put it in a glass or something? Wasn’t it kind of…”

“Intimate?”

“Yes.” Something flickers in her eyes—there and then not. Something bright like the first moment upon awakening, when the night’s dreams linger vivid as a jeweled bird flitting through a dappled patch of sunlight. There and then gone.

“Perhaps it did not occur to me.”

He watches her watching him. It’s as though he can feel the scales move as she weighs him.

“You’re attracted to me,” she states at last, a matter of hard fact, nothing more. Without letting him get a word in to deny it, she pushes herself to her feet and hurries off, casting one significant look over her shoulder before she exits the premises.

He cannot help but to follow her. At this point, the habit of chasing after Petrova women is too firmly engrained to ever resist the impulse.

Outside, she waits for him in the alley. 

“Care to illuminate—“

She shoves him against the wall and mashes her mouth against his. He can’t say he’s exactly thrilled by this, but then again, _he is_. He cannot help but grapple her up tight against him and steal the lead in this dance from her. She’s frightfully terrible at this anyway, and he cannot imagine she’s led the Salvatores _and_ his brother along on such a merry chase all year if she _usually_ kisses like this.

The longer it goes on, the more he realizes that for all of Elena’s enthusiastic response, her swarming mouth and churning hips and restless attempts to draw him impossibly closer, there’s still something dissatisfying about her. Something dampened. It’s like she’s not even here, like she’s not even kissing him. Like the whole thing is feigned.

He’s about to end this when she drops to her knees and fumbles with his belt buckle. He watches her as she unbuttons his fly and reaches out to stroke him. Her hands do not shake at all. She’s much better at this than she was at kissing, and when she leans forward to take him into her mouth, he has to close his eyes. He’s unfortunately certain that if he actually saw those lips wrapped around his cock, he would come on the spot.

Nonetheless, after only a few minutes, she does something tricky with her tongue that distracts him into looking down at her. It’s as sweet a sight as he can remember—as sweet, maybe, as the moment just before he tasted her that first time when she looked into his eyes and told him to go to hell. She’d been at the height of her beauty then, more beautiful by far than she is now. And yet the sight of saintly Elena Gilbert on her knees for him makes up for that. She glances up from beneath her long sooty lashes and their eyes lock. _She is here, she is here with him._ Her fingers clench against his thighs, and she takes him in deep, until he bottoms out against the back of her throat. They’re still looking into each other’s eyes when he comes. She swallows without pausing what she is doing, her tongue and her clever fingers milking every drop from him, and he wonders, abstractly, if she’s doing it out of habit or if it’s deliberate.

Afterwards, Elena brushes her hand across the back of her mouth and stands. He doesn’t help her, although he wonders if he should have once she’s on her feet. Unsure of himself, he reaches out to touch her, to say something, but she bats him away. There’s no real feeling in the movement, just a reflex. Already he thinks he must have seen wrong when their eyes had met. A trick of the light, of the flesh. Because whoever this is standing in front of him, she’s not really Elena Gilbert at all. It occurs to him that the problem with her is that she’s become insubstantial. A ghost wearing a vampire’s skin. It’s not supposed to work like that. And it can’t be her strange doppelganger nature that’s mucked this up—Katerina had turned out fine—it must be something about the girl herself. 

Just then, Elena turns those huge, dark eyes on him, and for a moment, she is real again. “Don’t tell Stefan.”

"Why would I? It was hardly worth writing home about.”

She nods. The words don’t seem to pierce her at all.

He watches her turn away, out into the brightly lit streets of wholesome Mystic Falls.

She doesn’t look back once.

Much as he is loath to admit this, even to himself, it is she who pierces him.

 

 

 

Several blocks away, where she is certain no one can see her, Elena leans against the side of a brick building, deep in the shadow of its awning, and takes huge, gulping breaths. She sucks her lower lip into her mouth and runs her tongue over her teeth. She can still taste Klaus’s spunk in the corners of her mouth, the back of her throat. Her heart can’t really race anymore; she’s not had enough human blood to create such a close illusion to life. But she feels like it would if it could.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since she turned, and the entire experience has been one horror after another. She can’t cope.

More than anything, she wants to punish herself for her instincts that had cheerfully urged her to rip Matt’s arm off so she could suck the marrow from his bones. _That had played through her mind_ , she’d been about to _actually do it_ , when Damon had intervened.

She has no idea what she’s doing, only that when she had seen the terror in Matt’s eyes, it had made her mouth water and her head pound, and it was only later, when she had come back to herself, that she had _felt_ like the monster she had always most feared becoming. That had been the most horrifying thing of all—to have been so close to toppling over the edge into inhumanity, and to have been unable to sense the impending fall until afterwards.

She hates herself, hates this body, hates this sick out of control feeling that gets stronger every day as her hunger, never really sated, gets worse and worse.

Tonight, as she’d sat at the Grill, head down against the cool sealed-wood surface, she’d _wanted_ to punish herself. Wanted to make herself feel as awful as possible. Debasing herself with _Klaus_ had seemed like just the ticket. 

Now, legs trembling from disgusting waves of lust, she knows she’s accomplished that and more. If she were to touch herself, she knows she’d find herself heavy and slick with desire. Ew ew ew.

That’s the worst part. That, while it was happening, it wasn’t just a self-loathing punishment, because she was _into it_. She’d totally forgotten what the point of this exercise was supposed to be. She’d gladly let Klaus open her mouth wide wide wide and plunder her with his tongue the way that she was sure he’d plunder her elsewhere. He’d run his hands all over her body and she’d _started it_ , she’d _asked for it_. She’d _enjoyed_ it.

Elena has always needed a cross to bear. Maybe this will be it. Her filthy, guilty secret. That one time she hated herself so much that she willingly dropped down on her knees to service the one person she should hate the very most.

And had gotten off on it.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!!


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

 

She keeps going back to Matt, taking only ever a very little, a trickle of blood to keep her going. Every time she reaches for more, the memory of that night behind the Grill with Klaus sobers her. Fills her with a different sort of driving hunger, chased with a potent shot of guilt. It's enough to sharpen her control, just barely enough, so she keeps feeding from Matt, keeps putting off Damon's offer to help her learn to hunt despite the sharpening pains in her belly, the burning in her throat.

Because if she learns to hunt, then there won't be any more denying it. She really will have transformed completely from girl to monster. And she can't live with that.

 

 

 

He spies her several days later from across the room at some annual party or another. Really, the entire year is riddled with them. He wonders how anyone on the Town Council has time to worry about vampires at all.

When he draws nearer to her, he sees what her polished appearance tries so hard to hide. She's on edge, a pale and shadowed thing lurking under her skin. He should chide her for being so obvious.

"You should at least make the attempt to appear human," he advises her.

Elena whips around and gapes up at him. Her mouth forms a soft pretty little  _oh_  that reminds him of what else she might do with it.

"I'm fine," she says, curt and direct. She moves to brush by him, as though he is nothing, no one.

He grabs hold of her arm and is startled by how cool she is to the touch.

" _What?_ "

"Mind you don't let your mask slip tonight, sweetheart. It's one thing for the mayor to know what we are, another for the whole town mob to descend upon us."

"You mean on  _me_."

"Yes. On you."

She breaks away and disappears back into the crowd.

There's small talk to make after that, Salvatores to torment and Lockwoods to either woo or threaten. He finds Caroline midway through and succeeds in whisking her away for a heated conversation over champagne cocktails, but he gets distracted by the sight of Elena prowling the edges of the party.

He doesn't know what's wrong with her. She's taken to being a vampire less well than she took to actually dying. Perhaps if he had been the one to change her, as he had been the one to kill her—

No use thinking that way. Done is done, and it's Damon Salvatore to have taken the lead there.

He watches as Elena takes a drink off of a passing waiter's tray and knocks it back. Makes a circuit of the room, finds another waiter, and downs another. Another. If she were still human, he'd wager she'd be drunk off her arse. But for a vampire, the signs are clear. She's using the alcohol to numb what must be truly astonishing hunger.

Someone stops her with a touch to her arm and he takes in the way she freezes, inhumanly still for just a microsecond, before that devastating smile unfolds on her face and she twinkles at whichever of the town's matrons it is stupid enough to have engaged a vampire so clearly on the cusp of losing control.

Idly, he wonders what would happen if she did snap and drain her conversation partner. He'd be interested to see Elena feed, to watch her face shift and those exquisite sharp gleaming teeth burst from her beautiful mouth. Except, then they really  _would_ be in a jam, because despite what he said to her earlier, he  _would_ step in to save her. He's had very promising reports out of Italy about a certain sword and he's feeling optimistic about returning her to the mortal coil.

Maybe that would fix her. Bring back the old, familiar Elena who he had not realized he rather liked, at least as far as these things go, until she had up and disappeared.

In the meantime, he excuses himself from his conversation with Caroline and surreptitiously makes his way toward Elena.

He takes hold of her elbow as soon as he reaches her and pulls her along with him, down a hall away from the mass of the party. "So sorry to interrupt, but I really must steal Miss Gilbert," he calls over his shoulder as he propels Elena along.

Elena waits until they are out of eyeshot before she swats at his hands. " _What are you doing?_ " she hisses at him.

"Saving your ungrateful little afterlife," he tells her brightly before bundling her into the cramped powder room. He locks the door behind them.

Elena leans against the sink, crosses her arms over her breasts, and glares. "Let me out."

"You're about twelve seconds away from ripping into the nearest artery."

"I'm  _fine._ "

"Hardly." He touches her cold arm. "Have you been subsisting on the blood of animals? That's inadvisable for the newly turned. The magic animating you is still settling."

"How is drinking animal blood different from drinking human blood anyway? Humans are animals too."

He frowns at her. "The magic doesn't see it that way. Is it Stefan forcing you to this?"

She shakes him off her arm and leans as far away from him as she can in the small space. "Stefan's not making me do anything. I've been feeding off Matt since I turned."

Matt, the one she'd almost killed, with such startling aftermath. Klaus pauses. A suspicion creeps in on him. "Only him?"

She nods, looks away.

"Dangerous arrangement. He must be as ensorcelled by you as all the rest."

She frowns at him. "No, he's just—we're just  _friends._  He knows I don't want to hurt anyone, so he offered. As a thank you."

He doesn't really care what for. "You're cold to the touch. You're not getting enough to eat from just the one vein. You'll either kill him or kill yourself trying."

"It's the best I can manage."

"I could teach you."

"You'd turn me into a ripper just to amuse yourself."

"I wouldn't. Scout's honor."

"Does  _anyone_ fall for that?"

"What about bloodbags? Those are relatively simple to obtain."

She rolls her eyes at him.

"Of course, your compulsion's probably too weak to manage that. I'm surprised you can even think straight."

She glares at him meaningfully. "Clearly I can't. Are we done yet?" She tries to shove past him but he blocks her way.

"I really can't have you exposing yourself," he tells her lowly. He lifts his hand to his mouth and bites down into the flesh of his palm. Offers it to her. "Consider this a stopgap, just to get you through the party."

Elena's eyes grow unnaturally dark, and he sees, with some satisfaction, the veins begin to bubble under her eyes. "We can't." Her eyes don't leave the ruby blood pooling in his hand. "It's too much like cheating."

To a vampire, it's  _exactly_ like cheating. But she doesn't need to know that. "I won't tell Stefan," he promises. Coaxes. "It'll be our little secret."

Between her hunger and the memory of what his blood had tasted like, which he can see just  _swimming_  in her eyes, she doesn't stand a chance. Elena grabs hold of the offered hand and licks the blood from his palm with one long, slow stroke of her tongue. It's artless and sensuous and he's pleasantly surprised when she moans—just this quiet, private little thing deep in her throat, not at all for his benefit and yet entirely to his pleasure.

She laves at his palm again, only to find that the wound is already healed.

"Bite," he encourages.

She obeys beautifully, teeth seizing into the thin flesh of his hand, their sharp tips grazing against the many fine bones.

It's the most natural thing in the world to draw her closer as she finally succumbs to what her body needs and craves. She must agree, because Elena presses herself needfully against his body, hips and belly and breasts flush against him, her legs tangling with his own as she crowds him against the sink. He buries his face in her hair and sucks in deep lungfuls of her scent.

She smells almost just the same as she had last year. The temptation to flip this around and sink his fangs into her throat is nearly overpowering. He can remember so vividly the way her blood had rushed and roared, rife with that potent magic that rolled through her blood like smoke billowing over a pond. Were he to taste her again, would that magic still lurk somewhere in her blood? Dormant, perhaps, curled up small, a tadpole in its soft gelatinous egg, waiting for the blush of mortality to return?

Someone knocks on the door. Elena growls at his wrist and pushes him more sharply against the sink.

Forget what he had said about her before. She is stunning like this, scarlet-eyed and crimson-lipped, a slave to her passion and her appetites. He's stirred over the memories from when he had cured her countless times, and none of them can surpass the vision before him.

Unable to help himself, he pries her off of him and kisses her on the mouth. It's a deep, open mouthed kiss, frenzied and consuming. Her teeth tear into his lips and sink into his tongue, sluicing their mouths with more blood. He thrusts his tongue against her own and tastes himself in her mouth, along the seam of her lips and against the roof of her mouth. Elena scratches at his back, pulls on his hair. It takes less than half a thought to turn and lift her onto the edge of the sink. Everything after that hazes and pulses. At some point she wraps her legs around his waist, rucking her dress to her hips. Desperately, he tongues at her neck, her jaw, the waterfall of his blood cascading down into the line of her cleavage. She's hot and flushed beneath his hands and mouth, tempting beyond comprehension. He wants to inhale her. Devour her. Damn the consequences.

The knock raps against the door again.

Elena sways in his grasp.

He looks up at her and sees that, at some point, the bloodlust has faded, settled back into human features. There's a sharpness in her gaze that hadn't been there before, a brightness that calls out to him, enthralls him. Ensnares him.

All at once, Elena's face drains of color, and she lurches out of his embrace. She throws the lock off the door and darts from the room, gone before he has time to react.

Slowly, Klaus straightens his jacket and takes stock of himself in the mirror. There's smeared blood dribbling down his chin and flecking the collar and cuffs of his white dress shirt. Not too much on the sink or floor, though. He pokes his head outside the powder room and finds the same matron Elena had been speaking to earlier waiting to get in. In her haste to retreat, Elena'd knocked the woman flat against the wall, and Klaus finds her only just now straightening herself back up.

The woman's eyebrows climb to her hairline. "I'm astonished by what I've just seen," she begins.

Klaus narrows his eyes at her. If she hadn't interrupted, Elena might not have left in such a hurry. He regrets saving her sorry neck and instead wishes fervently that he'd allowed Elena to do her in. Hell. He probably would have enjoyed watching—that is, before the madhouse descended upon them.

This woman's not his usual preference for a meal, but he's not opposed to breaking her neck to blow off a little steam.

Except, Elena would inevitably hear about it, and that would be awkward.

He settles for compelling her to walk in front of a car in two days time.

 

 

 

She barely makes it outside before she has to hurl her guts up into the shrubbery in a dark corner of the yard. She retches and retches, and it feels like gallons of blood must come up, a never ending humiliating wave that she deserves, deserves, deserves. She's kept this blood down barely any longer than she kept Klaus's blood down the night he saved her from the werewolf venom. It had been a miracle that she'd held down enough that night for the cure to take at all.

After, she lies down with her face pressed against the cool damp grass and breathes in the smell of living, growing things. Like this, she can hear the shift and tumble of the earth below her ears, the sounds of worms and insects burrowing through the soil, the stretching of thirsty roots. Night birds cry and rustle in the trees, and in the distance, cars zip over the highway. The stars wheel above her, so many more visible to her eyes now than there ever were before. It's an entirely new, alien world.  _She_ is alien. Dead and yet not dead. Her body unnaturally frozen, so much so that when she finally  _does_ die, she will never decompose, never be welcomed back into the embrace of the earth. So much for ashes to ashes and dust to dust. She wonders if this means that she'll never see her mother and father again, after all.

The coldness of the winter earth seeps into her flesh, whatever warmth Klaus had leant her leeched out of her entirely.

She'd been boiling over just a few minutes ago, electrified by the taste of his blood, the feel of his mouth. Swept up so completely in that frenzied tide that she'd forgotten everything,  _completely and utterly_. And for those precious few minutes, she'd felt alive again, careless and wild and in possession of herself. There had been that precipice again, and again she had not recognized it as such.

The knock on the door had saved her. One moment she had been impatiently encouraging Klaus and the next she had been hit with a bolt of stomach-churning nausea. The heat which had been so delicious only seconds before turned to the kind of feverish flashes that coated her in such a sheen of clammy sweat that it had been a miracle she had escaped before Klaus noticed.

The question of what would have happened if they hadn't been interrupted hunts her.

Now, it's obvious that it had all been a huge mistake from the very beginning. A confusion and a penance gone terribly wrong. What had Klaus been thinking, offering her his blood like that?

Maybe if she lies here long enough, she could sink back into the earth. It wouldn't be a true death if she let herself desiccate until the plants overgrew on top of her, their roots and vines holding her close, hiding her. But it's the closest she thinks she can come.

 

 

 

He can't get her off his mind after that.

And he tries—he really,  _really_ does. He concerns himself with exposing Tyler Lockwood's infidelities to Caroline, he toys with the wolf girl, he assigns hybrids to this task or to that and he pours out his frustrations on the Hunter who proves to be a gallingly useless source of information.

None of it does a bit of good.

When he closes his eyes, he sees the way she had looked at him, for that infinitesimal flicker of time, and he burns to have her look at him like that again.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and reviewing!!


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

 

"This is absurd," Elena mutters. "How does Klaus have the authority to put someone under  _house arrest_?"

Caroline readjusts the heaping basket of baked goods and sweets in her arms and fidgets with the blue satin bow. There's a huge GET WELL SOON! card, signed by what looks like the entirety of Mystic High, sticking out from the top.

Elena eyes the basket hard. Her stomach aches, but maybe if she could just find something to snack on, then she could distract herself. And Tyler will definitely have something on hand for her to drink. That always seems to work.

"Well, it's convenient anyway," her friend says, oblivious to the internal war of self-control Elena wages. "Ty can't come to school if he's supposedly recovering from being shot, but he'd never miss playoffs if he wasn't under marching orders."

Elena rings the doorbell. "You really think he'd blow our cover over basketball?"

" _Yes!_ He already missed most of his senior football season, I'm sure this is killing him." She straightens the card, so it's standing straight up in the little plastic brace supporting it, and smooths the bow again. The fretting rakes against Elena's already frayed nerves. Still. She knows Caroline well enough to know there's something she's sublimating with perfectionism.

"What's up?" Elena asks. Through the door, she can hear three unfamiliar male voices, squabbling over an xbox control. Every now and then, some imminently bored girl drawls what she assumes is supposed to be a cutting remark.

Caroline turns. "Why would anything be up? Nothing's up."

"Care—"

Tyler swings the door open and offers them both an exasperated smile. "Welcome to the mandatory party. Hey, is that basket for me?"

They follow Tyler up the stairs and down the hall to Tyler's wing of the house. In the sitting room adjacent to his bedroom, set up as a teenage boy's den, a group of what Elena supposes must be Tyler's hybrid bodyguards huddle around a plasma screen.

The smell crashes into her as soon as she enters the room. Scattered on end tables and windowsills are glasses with the sticky residue of human blood. There are other things too—empty beer bottles and tumblers that had once held bourbon or rye, an open pizza box with nothing but a few crumbs and a thick grease stain left in it. But everywhere she looks, all she can focus on are those trace amounts of blood filming the glasses.

Immediately, her vision darkens and narrows. Her teeth ache against her gums, and she knows that if she looked in the mirror she would see the beginnings of those dreaded veins writhing under her eyes. More than anything in the world, she wants to run her fingers inside those glasses, gather up all the blood they have in them, and lick her fingers clean. Except, if she does that, she'll just retch up whatever pathetic amount she's able to collect.

"Caroline," she whispers as quietly as she can—and that is very quiet indeed, with a room full of supernatural hearing. A room full of vampires and hybrids whose senses are probably all better than hers, because they've all been able to keep a healthy diet of human blood down, she thinks bitterly. No, not bitterly. Not bitterly, because her misery means she has been successful in hurting no one at all. Only herself, and she would gladly hurt herself every day for the rest of eternity rather than hurt an innocent, living person.

She has to try twice more before she can break Caroline's attention away from whatever conversation Tyler is having with the dark haired sullen girl on the couch.

Caroline, still holding the basket, returns to her side. She takes stock of Elena's face, the subtle signs that she's about to slip.

"I need to get out of here," she murmurs. "But I can't—" She gestures longingly at all of the empty glasses.

Understanding breaks across Caroline's face. Pity. She nods, sets the basket down, and takes hold of her arm. "I'll help you. C'mon." She turns to call over her shoulder, "Ty, we have to go. I'll be back later." She says this last with a bit of a warning edge, but Elena doesn't have time to ponder that.

Everything seems to pulse, that too bright fizzing sensation she remembers from the transition.

_The magic animating you is still settling._

Maybe she really will fall apart.

They never make it out of the room.

A shadow blocks their path.

" _Elena_."

She has no choice then but to look up, compelled by the force of her name, said like  _that_.

Klaus fills the doorway. Compared to the rest of them, he has a different sort of presence entirely. He's not particularly tall, but he towers over them like they're children.

"We're on our way out, Klaus," Caroline informs him. She tries to slip past him but he shifts in the doorway, keeping them penned in the room.

"Oh, why so soon? You've only just arrived, haven't you?" He's saying this to Caroline, but it's Elena forced to hold his stare. Those blue eyes never waver from her face.

This is just  _so_ not the time for this. She's about five breaths away from doing something really stupid that will expose her to everyone as a weak, defective, easy target. And just when she  _barely, barely_ gets it together enough to rein herself in, Klaus has to muck it all up. She cannot  _believe_ him.

She blocks out any and all reasons her mind oh so helpfully supplies her for why he would be looking at her so intently.

Caroline pastes a tight smile on her face. Her grip tightens on Elena's wrist. "Elena and I wanted a breath of fresh air. Too many canines in the room."

This teases a smile out of Klaus, soft and amused and different than the smiles he gives her. The surge of jealousy catches her totally off-guard.

Elena breaks free from Caroline to push past Klaus, but he snakes an arm out and throws an arm around her shoulder, effectively pinning her against him. She wishes she could stake him right about now.

Klaus pays absolutely no mind to her bristling body language as he drops a stick of dynamite into the room. "Speaking of dogs, has your Mr. Lockwood found the time to confess to you his dalliances with the little she-wolf? No?" He takes in Caroline's thunderstruck expression. The way Tyler and that girl on the couch freeze. This time, his smile is anything but soft. "Oops."

Caroline turns to Tyler, and Tyler throws up his hands, and Klaus takes the opportunity of their confrontation to spirit her from the room. They cross the length of the house, to another wing entirely, and wind up in an empty study dominated by a large mahogany desk. Klaus shuts the door behind them and locks it.

"Alone at last," he says with a sigh.

Fury spikes through her. "Not for long. I'm leaving." She marches past him to the door. She desperately needs to escape this situation  _yesterday_.

"Oh, come on, now. Don't be so melodramatic." He reaches out to touch her shoulder, and she spins around to face him.

"You're cruel just to be cruel, Klaus. It makes me sick." She tries to shove him away, but he's so very, very strong, even now. Tears gather in her eyes. Jealousy, anger... and yes, there.  _Desire._ She's on absolute overload. She's going to explode.

He doesn't let her go, but neither does he drag her closer, the way part of her expects and craves. "Would you rather your friend continued blissfully unaware? I think I did her a service."

"I know you have some weird fetish for screwing with my life, but Caroline is off-limits."

This surprises him. He lets her go and circles over to the desk, his back to her. "Some weird fetish for screwing with your life?" he repeats.

Elena edges toward the door. Carefully, she turns the knob while his back is turned. The damned thing needs a key to be unlocked. A key, she realizes, which must be in Klaus's pocket. Maybe she can rip the door off its hinges. That seems like something she should be able to do now.

Klaus looks up at her, sees her by the door, and this slow, creeping smile twists his mouth. It's not really a smile at all. "Ah, turned rabbit, are we? It doesn't suit you in the least." He stalks toward her. "I thought it was time for us to have a little talk. A heart to heart, if you will."

"I don't know what we could possibly have to talk about." She yanks on the door. The hinges pop. It should be easier than this, if she had only ever had enough to really eat. Not once since she turned has she managed that.

Klaus pauses a mere foot away from her and cocks his head. He appraises her openly, his eyes trailing over every inch of her in a way that makes her stomach clench. "You should be thanking me for getting you out when I did," he drawls. "You're obviously about to faint—which takes some doing in our kind. Tell me, how is this Matt fellow faring?"

"He's fine. I'm fine."

"Wonderful. Then you'll do me the favor of staying put for a chat."

"No thank you."

"I do not think my request unreasonable," he tells her mildly. Casually, he raises his wrist to his mouth.  _Oh no._ She's riveted—utterly captivated—as he bites down and the dark, wild tang of his blood explodes through the room. "It is," he continues as though he has not unleashed this most irresistible of bombshells on her, "may I remind you, you who were the one who first engaged  _me_." He swoops in, then, and pins her against the door with his hard, lean body. One hand tangles in her hair. His chest brushes hers, so she can feel each ragged breath he takes. He is not nearly so composed as he wants her to believe. He brandishes his wrist right in front of her face. All she would have to do to taste him again would be to lean forward, just barely. That tantalizing scent grabs hold of her whole body and begs her to do it. He so very clearly wants her to do it.

She is so very, very hungry. For more than just blood.

It would be surpassing fancy to imagine her capable of resisting.

But there is that voice, in the back of her head—the voice of the girl who knows that this is wrong, that it's not just a betrayal of Stefan, her boyfriend whom she loves, really she does—it's a betrayal of everyone else she loves—and of herself. Because, today, she's not doing this to punish herself. She's doing this because she wants to  _feel_. And, so far, this is the only thing she's found that works.

That voice is so very quiet, and the sound of Klaus's heart, hammering in his chest, is so much louder. It's drowned out so easily, so lost, and she is lost. Drowned.

Elena leans forward and laps at the blood at Klaus's wrist. Some light suction, and the partly healed bitemark bursts open again. Heat and longing and life, sharp and bright and full and ripe, burst over her tongue, wash over her bones. There's power here in this blood that she almost recognizes, but she can't quite put her finger on why, but she responds to it, differently than she had responded to Damon's blood. Klaus's grip on her hair grows merciless, but she revels in that scalp-tingling sear, because it's a full true feeling, and for so long she has been nothing but numb, numb, numb. Her heart lurches painfully in her chest, the muscles unused to working at their normal speed, and her blood—his blood?—feels like fire in her veins as it races to expel the death from her muscles and bones. She feels like a sparkler going off when her fangs slice into his arms.

"There's my girl," he breathes. He crowds her against the door, and she cannot help herself, just like she couldn't help herself in the bathroom last week—she rolls her hips and rises up, meeting the impatient thrust of his hips, reveling in the feel of this sleek, powerful body against her own. One leg hooks around his waist, and the world see-saws as the door groans and cracks, and she loses her footing altogether.

They collapse onto the floor and her fangs disengage with a clack as she lands on top of Klaus.

If there is a moment to run, this is it.

Except he leans up on his elbows and captures her face between his hands, and he kisses her like the stars are going out.

This all feels like a mess and a problem and maybe like the worst thing she's ever, ever done, but it also  _feels_ like something. Her body pulses, heart and lungs and blood and desire, hot and slick, a galloping throb that washes away everything frightening and wretched.

When he kisses her, she forgets she wants to die.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hold tight, I might have a second update coming along later today. Because, you know, I had too much sangria last night and couldn't update on time.


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

 

This is going well.

He pulls back from her mouth to study her, and she stares him down boldly. She’s straddling his hips, has been since she tripped them over some minutes ago. His blood splatters her lips, her chin and fingers. Paired with that fierce vampire’s gaze, it’s altogether a thoroughly arresting sight. That talk he’d been after can wait. What he wants very much, right now, is to relieve her of her clothes and to have her like this, looking at him with a raw intensity like ball lightning on a moonless night. 

She leans forward, swift as death, and recaptures his lower lip between her teeth. So far, these kisses that make him bleed are much the better of the one she gave him that night outside the Grill. This much of his blood in her system frenzies her— as well it should. It delights him. She writhes against him, twisting her hips in a way that he knows means she will need his help if she is to find any relief.

“There’s my girl,” he murmurs into her mouth as his hand slips up, under her shirt, to palm at her breast. His other hand maps the curve of her hips, and his thumb traces the burning, sensitive skin right at the waistband of her knickers. “There’s my good girl.”

This, of all things, is what pulls Elena back. Her fangs recede and her eyes clear and she stares at him like he’s flaying her alive. She scrambles off of him, unnaturally clumsy for a vampire, and staggers to her feet. 

“This is a mistake.” She says it to herself, with a million-yard stare, like she’s forgotten all about him. She actually has the nerve to sound ill. Guilt is its own cult, he supposes, and Elena must be one of its saints. “I have to find Caroline.”

The maelstrom that has been spiraling out of control on the other side of the house has finally worn itself out. Caroline left some minutes ago, too upset to even remember Elena, but he does not bother to tell Elena that. 

Klaus wipes the blood from his mouth and stands. It seems the time for the talk he’d wanted has arrived all on its own.

“It’s hardly a mistake if it keeps happening,” he observes.

She lifts her head from where she’s been transfixed by her bloodied fingers and glares at him. “It only keeps happening because _you_ keep foisting your blood on me!” She points at him accusingly. “You’re—you’re a foister!”

“And you’d have no trouble resisting if you simply took me up on my offer to teach you how to hunt properly.”

“No.”

“Come now, it will be fun.”

“Was this supposed to be fun?”

He raises both eyebrows. Adjusts his rumpled clothes. “I thought it rather was. Or what else are the kids calling it these days?”

“What can you possibly get out of this? You hate me.”

He scoffs. “Hardly.” And here, he must tread carefully. Wisdom urges him to say no more, but there’s another part that senses he may be able to turn Elena’s course with the right words. He chooses not to analyze how very much his heart speeds when he tells her, “I actually find myself to be rather… fond of you. You have a certain… indefinable appeal, quite apart from your utility, from which I am not… immune.”

This does not have the hoped for effect.

“You have a _crush on me?_ _You don’t even have an ulterior motive?_ ” Disgust drips from her voice. She starts to pace, and her arms gesture wildly, like startled birds, as she speaks. “God! I just assumed _you_ were doing this to get back at Stefan for something, or to blackmail me down the line, or to maneuver me into doing something reprehensible. But _no. Of course_ you’re not doing this for _normal reasons!_ ”

Only a Petrova would list any of those things as normal.

Only he would agree.

But that’s quite enough. He uses his superior speed to cut directly into her personal space and grab hold of her. Anything to stop that maddening circling ‘round. She’s deliciously warm under his fingers. “It takes two to tango, sweetheart. Why, pray tell, are you still here if the idea so repulses you?”

“Obviously because I hate myself.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “No, that’s not it at all.”

“What about Caroline?” she asks him desperately.

“What about her?”

“I thought—I thought you had feelings for her.”

“Irrelevant.” It’s not Caroline who haunts his every thought.

“I want to go.” She holds out her hand for the key to the door.

“Are you really too much a coward to face yourself?”

Her mouth twists into a corpse’s rictus of a smile. “Unlike you, I have a doppelganger to show me all of my worst flaws.”

“There’s something between us. You feel it too.”

“All I feel is self-loathing. Disgust. I don’t feel anything for you.”

“You’re a liar.”

The smile slips, subsumed by something quieter, sadder, realer. “Not about this. I don’t feel anything for you at all.” 

Some feeling flashes through him, a brief pressure in his chest, but he pushes it aside in favor of a nasty smile and a lingering once over of her body. “Thank you for clarifying. In that case, please do give Miss Forbes my regards, will you? No need to settle for a cheap copy when one’s already sampled the best.”

Elena’s palms are oddly damp when he relinquishes the key, and her fingers tremble. She searches his face, with such intensity that he thinks she must see straight through every scrap of rage and viciousness with which he has armored himself this past millennium, into the sad, love-starved thing he’d been _before_. She looks at him like she sees him entirely. Knows him entirely. “Fuck you, Klaus,” she says with soft deliberation.

That same feeling curls around his heart, as though he’s taken a stake.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand we’re back. Thank you for the many reviews I received on this, here and elsewhere!


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

 

Stefan’s still determined to show her all of the best parts of being a vampire, despite the rough start they got off to.

They go rock climbing up the side of a sheer cliff face, and when they make it to the top, they watch the sun set before jumping screaming from the summit into the quarry of deep water hundreds of feet below. They swim for hours without tiring, the moonlight sparkling off the dark rippling surface as they splash through the icy waves.

He takes her to the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. The vaguely familiar strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony pour into her ears and saturate her senses with a blend of warmth and bitter sorrow and pulsing longing in a way that she’s never before experienced. She can hear each individual instrument—the warm vibrations of the cello, the higher resonance of the violin. The breath that whistles through the clarinets and flutes and transforms as it rushes out to fill the hall. The drums boom in her chest, and the horns knocks her senseless. Tears spring to her eyes as she hears as she has never heard before.

And in Mystic Falls, he takes her to his bedroom, the familiar, comforting nest of their love. What she’d said when she first turned, weeks and weeks ago now, is still true. When he touches her, no matter how lightly, how casually, her whole body feels ready to burst into flame.

The only problem is that they haven’t yet had sex since her death.

It’s not that she doesn’t _want_ to. It’s just that there’s something dissatisfying about all of it, and she has the sinking feeling that the real problem is that, despite Stefan’s best and most sincere efforts, nothing he’s offered her gives her the same vicious thrill as those stolen encounters with Klaus had done. It’s like everything Stefan wants her to see and feel is meant to make her see her transformation as something wondrous, something that could spell their happily ever after and after and after if she could only find the strength to smile like she used to. The realization that she would rather give in to her new nature, that she would rather revel in her new strange appetites and instincts, _would rather just be a vampire_ , makes her feel truly vile. It does not make her heart pound any less when she remembers what it had felt like to bury her teeth in him, though.

He sighs and pauses, rising from between her legs and resting his chin against her hipbone. His mouth is shiny from his efforts, but she has to admit that her mind has wandered.

It is very, very hard to feign enthusiasm when everything your lover does to you and for you never manages to elicit the same fervent response as it had before.

“You’re not into this.” He says it so gently, just a point of fact. She feels like a traitor for wishing he would be rough with her.

“Why don’t we try something new?” she ventures.

He examines her face, seems to find something significant in her expression, though she cannot say what. “Okay.”

He climbs up her body, all of that lean strength and those pale muscles on display in a way that used to make her knees weak.

 _All the fear’s gone now that you’re a vampire too,_ she thinks.

Why would she miss that?

Propped on his elbows right above her, their faces almost nose to nose, he asks her, words soft against her lips, “What were you thinking?”

She rolls her naked hips against his and feels him only half-hard against her. Going down on a cold fish must not be exciting for him, either.

“Let me bite you,” she whispers in his ear.

Immediately, she can feel his interest in the way that his whole body freezes.

“Elena…” He trails off, doesn’t need to continue because she already knows how that sentence is going to end.

“No, seriously. Let me bite you. You said it was pleasurable, right?”

He strokes his hand over her face. “If you bite me, you’ll be giving into the darkest parts of your nature. I would rather you didn’t have to face that.” Even as he says these things, she can feel the intensity of his hunger jutting against her mons. 

“I want to, Stefan. I want to be that close to you.”

“You can’t keep my blood down.”

She wrinkles her nose for a minute, thinking of how she has paid each time she’s consumed what Klaus offered her.

“That’s not the point,” she tells him finally. “Stefan. I want this. Please. If you want this too… Then let’s.” 

He agrees—of course he agrees when she reveals how earnestly she wants this to be the thing that makes _them_ —he and she— _work_.

He crawls up to the top of the bed, so that his back rests against the mound of silky pillows, and tugs her up with him, so that she’s nestled in the crook of his arm. Everything about this moment is deliberate and tender, and when he nips into his wrist and offer it to her, the very room overflows, scented with his love for her, his regard and his hope and his yearning.

She takes hold of his wrist and bites deep, the motion natural to her, something she hopes he does not realize she has done more than once.

And it’s good, it’s really good, even if his blood is a little cooler, a little more watery, from the animal blood with which he mostly sustains himself.

Stefan’s head tips back against the headboard. She steals a glance at his face, finds his eyes closed, lips parted. He moans, helplessly, when she fists his cock in her hand and begins pumping him at the same rhythm with which she drinks from him.

There’s something very different about doing this with Stefan than there had been with either Klaus or Damon. Some piece that she expects to find, the one that makes her feel whole, but is instead missing from the composition. Perhaps it’s because he is not in her direct lineage.

Actually, Stefan is like her uncle now.

The thought floats murkily in the background as she works him. At his urging, she grinds herself against the heel of his palm until she hits a small, rippling peak. A peak she only reaches because she envisages another lover driving her urgently on.

Later, when Stefan’s jizz is splattered over her fingers, when he pulls her against him and kisses the flaking blood from the corners of her mouth, it’s still that other lover on her mind.

 

 

 

That other lover, and the momentary relief she finds in his arms.

 

 

 

The contrast to every other nightmarish moment, dragging on before her into boundless, terrifying eternity.  

 

 

 

If he were to be honest—and that is always a big if— were he to be honest, a whole series of _who might it be_ ’s goes through his mind when he hears the furtive knock against the front door, each and every one of them more expected than Elena Gilbert, huddled under the glow from the porte-cochère lamps. Something seizes in his chest. He smashes the emotion before he can dare to name it.

By the time their eyes meet, he’s already schooled his expression into that of bored disdain. “Come to beg something of me?” Perhaps she has crossed Rebekah again, and is in need of his aid. Surely he could turn that to his favor. Subtly, though. Better to play the knight than the debt collector.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she tells him.  

Before he can inquire further, she launches herself at him. Leaps upon him, wrapping her arms around his neck and her long legs around his waist and tugging his face up to meet her own in a starved kiss. She devours him, laying waste to whatever petty retributions his pride may have demanded, to whatever reservations he might have been trying to dredge up these past few weeks, thin reminders of why he had vowed never to involve himself with another Petrova woman ever again. In turn, he crushes her to him and leans into her mouth to gather what honeyed caresses she might offer. He cannot help himself. He is helpless to her passion.

Whatever has changed since she fled from him the last time he saw her, the result is devastating. There is no hesitation in her. Only fire, in strange contradiction to the coolness of her skin.

She doesn’t bite him this time, but she keeps on looking at him with that same intensity that had swept him up, captured his thoughts and his desires and turned them all around until this black-eyed girl lay at the heart of everything.

His most fervent wish is to do the same to her, to twist her round til she has no more room in her pretty little head for this Salvatore or that one. Only him.

They make it upstairs, somehow, their clothing shucked off and strewn in a pathway that leads from the grand stairs to the foot of his bed. His bed, which he knocks into backwards, blind and intoxicated on her kisses and the shape and weight of her, her bare skin and urgent embraces. No sooner does he stumble than she shoves him onto the mattress. She follows a blink later, climbing atop him and staring him down with all of those white sharp fangs on wicked display. Her hands trace his breastbone. He can feel the slickness of her desire against his groin where she straddles him.

Here, right at the last possible moment, she freezes—and he can see how this will play out if he lets it. She’ll be up and out the door and then who knows how long he’ll have to wait for his next opportunity. Who knows if he’ll have another chance to see that sleek, enthralling vampire’s smile again before he returns her to her mortal state.

He won’t allow it.

Moving before she can slip one way or another on the knife’s edge of uncertainty she so clearly dances upon, he grasps her by the hips, aligning her body with his own, and slides into her. Shock slips over her face. A shudder rolls through her body when he thrusts up into her, seating himself deeper inside of her. Elena moans for him, then, a surrender as clear as he has ever heard, and rolls her hips. Her fingers claw into his chest. Blood beads beneath her nails. Together, they search out a rhythm in that ancient, all-conquering of languages. Her cunt is slippery and cool, but she clenches him with a maddening grip that robs him of his reason. She looks him full-on in the face when she comes, eyes wide and liquid with a searching need that strips him to the bone. A few more thrusts into her rippling body has him toppling over the edge after her, coming helplessly beneath her.

 

 

 

She stays longer afterward than he would have ever credited that she might.

They lie side by side at the foot of his bed, faces turned toward each other, shoulders, arms, hips, and thighs only inches apart. Those inches, and an unimaginable distance between them. He is not so much a fool to think they have o’erleapt it in one evening.

“What am I to do with you?” he asks her.

“I don’t know. I thought this might be the answer.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know.” She sits up and scoots to the edge of the bed. Bends to retrieve her knickers from the floor. Each of her ribs is visible along her sea-serpent’s spine.

“You’re coming back,” he tells her. Tells her, because he is too afraid to ask.

She studies him over her shoulder.

He tries not to let anything at all show on his face.

“Yes,” she tells him, finally.

Elena walks out the door that night. She comes back the next.

So begins their affair in earnest.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

 

She is the one who seeks him out after that. It’s a heady feeling, to be the thing she cannot do without.

Night after night, for weeks that spread across the early spring, he has her in his bedroom, in the downstairs parlor spread out in front of the fireplace, on top of the dining room table. There is a memorable night at a town charity when she catches his eye across the room and, when he follows her out to the gardens, she pulls him into the flower beds. For the rest of the evening, he has the satisfaction of knowing the grass stains on the back of her dress are his doing. 

 

 

 

Except, of course, it’s Stefan with whom she leaves.

 

 

 

There’s a frenetic quality to her kisses, to her caresses and her urgent, coaxing hips and lips and elegant long-fingered hands. She kisses him like she might combust if they slow down. Maybe she will. 

Only when he is finally inside of her does she pause. Not so anyone would notice— but he is not anyone. It is an infinitesimal thing, that freezing, fleeting blink of an eye when she looks down at him and seems to remember him, remember herself. His heart leaps in his chest when their eyes lock, because like this, she is not quite the ghost nor the vampire, but very nearly the human girl who would never have climbed into his bed. When this happens, he gathers her in closer, kisses her until she forgets herself again. He wants her to forget and forget and forget, at least for just a little longer.

It works, and he revels in how fiercely her passion matches his own.

 

 

 

Afterwards, she clambers out of the bed and makes haste putting herself to rights.

She never stays, once she has gotten what she came for.

He watches her while she straightens her sweater and finger combs her hair, doing her feeble best to hide the evidence of their trysts.

He wonders if Stefan knows anyway.

 

 

 

Her hunger never fails to strike a thrill through him.

She kisses him in his second drawing room with such terrible famine, mouth like a maw, all teeth and barely suppressed lethal instinct, her fingers claws scraping bloody tracks against the back of his neck.

There’s a growing part of him that yearns for this exact moment, when he can taste her need for him, primal and vast, a fathomless lake within her. He’s never been needed in the way he senses that _she_ needs him. It feeds something inside of him. Something small and thirsty for these stolen moments, for the small tastes of herself which she gives him.

Strange to think that he had judged her so harshly when first she kissed him. He can now see _exactly_ how she could lead so many around by the collar, because that is exactly what she is doing with him.

Her simple kisses are the stuff of his nightmares.

Unsatisfied with such chaste, if deadly, delights for long, she soon moves from his mouth, along the edge of his jaw, to the juncture of shoulder and throat. She gives him a long, firm lick there, and he shivers in her arms. She feels his reaction to her, and just that, something so small, is enough to make her draw back. He cannot show the least bit of feeling for her, of true excitement, or she will run away.

“I have to go,” she says. 

He grabs hold of her wrist. “Don’t.”

“Tell me again why you’re here,” she says, urging him to lie to her, to spin some wicked tale that will ease her conscience.

“I want you,” he tells her, with enough honesty to strip her flesh to the bone.

She shakes her head. “I wish that you didn’t. It would be so much easier if you didn’t.” She slips free of him, or he lets her slip free, and wraps her arms around herself. Her movement sets her thin shoulder bones jutting out from beneath the skin. His blood stains the tips of her fingers.

“Would you really rather I were using you?”

“The way I’m using you? Yes.”

“I’m hardly getting the short end of the bargain here, sweetheart.”

“I don’t think I should give you anything you want. I think anything you want must be bad.”

He raises an eyebrow and observes her closely. “Why is that? I’m not planning anything particularly sinister just this moment.” If she were better fed, she would be able to hear the Hunter rattling against his chains. But she is not. “Unless having my way with you counts.” His eyes linger on her body in a way closer to an actual caress than a glance.

“I don’t want to want you,” she says. “I don’t want you to want me.” She tries to scrub her hands through her hair, notices instead the red residue on her fingers. She brings her fingers to her mouth like she cannot help herself, because she _can’t_ , and Klaus knows he has her then.

He takes hold of her hands and draws her to him, his touch as gentle and light as moonlight falling on fresh snow. He guides her mouth back to his neck, to where she had placed it so temptingly close to his jugular, and coaxes her to bite. “That’s it,” he murmurs, voice thick with passion, as she drinks from him.

He still doesn’t understand why she’s letting herself edge so close to the brink of starvation, but if it gives him an in with her, he will not question it too far. And it’s not as though he hasn’t enjoyed feeding her.

 

 

 

The Hunter has been chained up in his study-cum-dungeon for weeks now. His house guest is either quite a determined actor or really does know impressively little about his own lineage.

The thing of it is, the situation is coming to a head. He’ll have to do away with him either way soon. He just has to decide how much he still desires what information the Hunter might yet conceal before he does.

 

 

 

She falls to her knees before him, a supplicant, a goddess, and blows him like a master. He cannot help but reflect on where an eighteen-year-old girl has learned her bedroom skills. Wonders if Stefan has been her tutor, or if she had come to his bed already versed in these arts. 

He wonders who exactly has had her first.

 

 

 

It’s not til much later that he catches himself thinking that he would like to have her last.

 

 

 

The next time she comes to him, he catches her in a wing of the house to which he has purposefully never brought her.

She stands with her back to him, sifting through a stack of finished paintings. The ones he thought turned out poorly, he realizes with a bolt of horror.

“Growing a bit presumptuous, are we?” he grinds out.

She turns to face him at the sound of his voice, not even bothering to _pretend_ to be guilty. She does look surprised though. As though she had not heard him approach. Signs such as these, that prove how little she is sustaining herself on, always make him uneasy.

“I like these.”

“Are you mocking me?” He’s used to his siblings taunting him about his work, but he feels exposed and tender under her scrutiny.

“I like seeing that you’re human, after all.”

She is so very wrong. But he doesn’t bother to correct her. He is cruel, but, apparently, even he has his limits.

 

 

 

He flourishes his bleeding wrist before her.

She looks up into his face with eyes like liquid night, huge and luminous with _want._

As always, she takes what he offers her.

 

 

 

“What do you get out of this?”

“I just want to feel alive again. I feel that, when I drink from you.”

“You’re deader than most, it’s true. But that’s not the vampirism that’s done that to you.”

“No, it’s not. But it doesn’t help.”

 

 

 

She always comes to him, but that does not mean that there are not nights when he passes by her pristine white house and pauses, for just a moment, to watch her without the smokescreen she prefers to throw up whenever she can think to do it.

Most of the time she is all quiet smiles, lecturing her brother to do his homework, cleaning dishes and texting and reading dreary English novels, her legs kicked up over the back of the living room sofa and her rich dark hair cascading over the arm, trailing on the floor.

When she is at home, as near as he can tell, she likes to pretend she has never fucked him senseless.

When she is at home, she likes to pretend that she is still a girl, human and sweet.

 

 

 

Self-delusion is a vice he could never tolerate easily.

 

 

 

But then, sometimes, she is alone, and he catches, for just a moment, a shadow sliding into her eyes.

 

 

 

 Somewhere in that shadow is the real Elena Gilbert.

 

 

 

She’s a star, falling in on herself. He cannot help but be drawn into her orbit.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter got rather long, so I've cut it in half. Just a few more chapters to go until we hit the end of this. Thanks for reading and for reviewing!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My hand slipped. Please enjoy a second update. If you just tuned in, make sure you read chapter 7, which was also posted today!

 

 

 

He spots her huddled up in a corner of the Grill with Damon Salvatore, voices pitched so low even he cannot pick up on the topic furrowing their brows.

They are totally absorbed with each other, their dark heads pressed together.

The knowledge that Damon Salvatore is still in love with her barrels through him all at once, a detail he has so often overlooked in the face of Stefan’s more obvious pose as Elena’s actual boyfriend.

As he watches them, unhappily observing that there is something so natural about the two of them together, an unexpected openness plays over Elena’s features, and he realizes that he has been in error. Somehow, when his head had been turned, he had failed to notice Damon overtaking Stefan’s place as his chief rival. Damon, whose blood had turned her.

Some formless suspicion teases at the edge of his thoughts.

Neither of them notice him until he steps right up to them. Sloppy. He could have Damon’s heart in his fist before either of them looked up.

“If you’re going to conspire, you might choose a less public venue,” he drawls, leaning back against the bar, drink in hand.

Damon Salvatore offers him an infuriatingly pleasant smile. “Sorry, we haven’t checked our comments box yet, but we’ll be sure to take your feedback into consideration.” He shifts forward, subtly, when he talks. Placing himself between the perceived threat and Elena. Klaus wishes he could see Damon’s reaction if only the other vampire knew how many nights found Elena in his arms.

“What do you want?” Elena asks him bluntly, from behind Damon’s shoulder. She doesn’t bother to push the annoying obstacle out of the way.

_I want you to choose me instead._

“The barkeep’s covered in bandages,” he tells her instead. He nods toward the blond teenager pouring pints behind the counter. “I assume that is _the_ Matt.” Elena’s scent is all over him. “Mind he does a better job of covering the evidence of your activities in the future. It wouldn’t do at all for anyone to start asking questions.”

Damon frowns and raises his brows at Elena, silently communicating something to her which she obviously picks up on, because she gives a nearly imperceptible shake of her head _no_. Klaus does not like this interplay at all.

The far more irritating of the Salvatore brothers turns back to him. “Remind me again why you’re even still _here_?”

He cannot help but glance to Elena.

“I could ask the same thing of you. Don’t I recall hearing something about whichever of you boys she didn’t choose was going to leave town forever? It seems to me that Elena’s chosen the better brother.”

That bland smile slides right off the other vampire’s face. Damon stands, and Elena jumps to her feet with him. “Let’s say goodbye, Elena.”

Elena looks right at him. “Goodbye.” She hurries out the door after Damon Salvatore.

 

 

 

Later, she storms back into the Grill and hauls him into the bathroom with her. She locks the door and shoves him back against the wall.

“The fuck was that?” she asks.

“Friendly advice. Your Matt’s a walking advertisement for a vampire chew toy.”

“ _Please.”_

He narrows his eyes and studies her. “So what’s it to be? Is Damon Salvatore now to be one of your acolytes as well?”

Her fingers curl around the front of his shirt. “You’re _jealous_.”

“Of Damon Salvatore? Never.”

“You want me and you’re jealous and you can’t stand it.”  Something unexpected sparks in her eyes. A glimmer of excitement, perhaps—he doesn’t have time to analyze it, whatever it is, before she’s pushing him further into the wall, pressing into him with her hands and her chest, her legs tangling with his, and her mouth cool and hungry against his own.

 _No, I can’t stand it_ , he thinks as her clever fingers unfasten his belt. As she takes him, somehow, rather than the other way around, what _should_ be the other way around, he thinks, muzzily, that he can’t stand it at all.

 

 

 

“I thought you didn’t want me to want you,” he tells her as he rebuttons and rebuckles. There’s a damp patch on his shirt from when she had bitten him, but the dark olive color of the fabric hides it well.

Elena has the nerve to look away. He notices the dark circles under her eyes, darker by the day. In the wan fluorescent light, she looks insubstantial as mist.

For a moment, he fears she really _is_ going to unravel, the magic animating her starved by her stubborn diet. He’s seen fledglings die like that before.

 _No,_ he thinks, he’s feeding her. He’s taking care of her. She will be fine.

“Sometimes I surprise even myself,” she tells him, finally.

 

 

 

Elena leaves first—she always does—and so when he does make his way out to the bar, he finds a moment to corner this Matt during close-up.

The boy’s not on vervain—how could he be, when he’s Elena’s sole source of sustenance?—and so it is shamefully easy to compel him.

Elena needs to feed more often, and he’ll do what he must to be sure of it.

 

 

 

_I like seeing that you’re human, after all._

He can feel the weakness— _the_ weakness—taking root in him, and if that is not human, he does not know what is.

 

 

 

She comes to him and he takes her upstairs to his bedroom, where he has a fire laid, and he sets her down in front of it so that its heat might sink into her skin. She lets him tear off her shirt, splay his hands against her ribs, his fingers tucking into the too prominent hollows between each one, thumbs tracing the dip down to her hips. He touches with his mouth the whole length of her spine, her arms and her shoulders, belly and breasts and throat, and she basks in it, touching him and urging him on, until she sits up and tells him, as though in a dream, “I have to go.”

Klaus’s eyes cloud. “I think that’s up to me.” He presses an open mouthed kiss into her inner thigh, where her blood pumps idly through her femoral artery. She gasps under his touch.

“Klaus, this feels—“ Her voice, high and feminine and soft, falters when he hitches her legs over his shoulders and tastes her fully. He doesn’t care to listen to whatever it is she has to say. Cannot listen or think at all, when the flavor of her desire, fragrant and consuming, is thick on his tongue.

In the past, he never had a reputation as a particularly selfless lover. But in this, this slow art of opening this most secretive of girls with the simple act of yielding between her thighs, he finds he has patience enough.

Elena comes apart under his mouth, gasping his name, and he finds he is in no hurry to move on. He keeps on, for what seems an eternity, lost in her, his tongue pressing into her, savoring her, hands tracing her hips, her thighs, and then, as he wrings a second orgasm from her, his fingers intertwining with her own.

 

 

 

Her fingers play with the short, damp strands of hair at the nape of his neck. The leaping flames gild her skin, the sight so familiar it almost pains him. She feels almost warm like this. He rests his cheek against her damp thigh and breathes her in, the scent calming, familiar. An oasis.

She makes no effort to get up, which is to the good, because he is not finished with her yet anyway.

When he moves up her body, he pauses just on the brink of entering her, the head of his cock brushing against her slick folds.

Elena stares up at him with eyes wide open. There is something he thinks he might say to her, here, now, but he is at a loss for words.

She lifts and rolls her hips, helplessly, all the while not breaking eye contact, and it takes less than a thought to push inside of her.

There’s something different about this night, something that has been insubstantial in the past but is being made real right now. He takes his time with her, moving slowly inside of her, angling his thrusts to rub insistently, torturously, against that spot inside of her that makes her eyelids flutter and her mouth part so prettily. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him full on the mouth, her sweetness so unexpected that he falters. She does not let him go, but tugs him closer against her. He can feel the way she clenches around him, can feel the way her breath hitches in her chest. She opens her eyes and frowns at him, but not before he sees something foreign in her eyes, some naked emotion that he knows she sees reflected in his own. He cannot help himself, then, finally. He comes, and something about this feels different than it has before.

 

 

 

After, she turns her head away, so she can press her face into the curve of his shoulder. “Don’t you think this is a huge mistake? I do.”

“Stop saying that.” 

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she tells him without elaboration. She sounds terribly forlorn.

He gathers her up in his arms and strokes her hair. “There’s no going back now, my darling girl.”

She won’t drink from him when he offers, but she does kiss him, and when he takes her again, this time in his bed, she doesn’t look away from his face even once.

 

 

 

His words to her that night prove true.

Something has shifted between them, and try as he might, he cannot shift it back. Does not truly want to shift it back.

 

 

 

Except, she avoids him for almost a week after that. A week, in which time he argues with Bex and half-heartedly pursues Caroline and Tyler Lockwood’s end, paints and broods and goes back and forth a dozen times or more on what precisely he shall do with the Hunter whose days are fast dwindling.

After weeks of sampling her near every night, the time without her drives him to an addict’s fury. After that night beside the fire, he does not think that he shall ever get her out of his system.

Finally, he can stand it no longer.

He catches her on her doorstep and yanks her back before she can make it past the threshold.

She spins in his arms, almost warm to the touch. The wind shifts her hair, bringing with it the smell of Stefan Salvatore, and beneath that, a faint note of the other brother.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he says, voice low and flat.

“Yes.”

He hauls her back, into the shadows that grow deep against the house. Pins her against an old oak tree with his body and tries to control the murderous jealousy that spits through his body as he imagines what she has been doing with them but not him.  Pressed up against him, she molds to his body instantly. It infuriates him. He wants to bite her, mark her, make her his and his alone. But to bite her would be to kill her for true. He is still tempted.  

His hands shake as he grabs hold of her face so that she must look at him—not as she had that night, but close enough. 

She stares up at him unflinchingly, those black eyes of hers inhuman and haunted. 

Something of his black thoughts must show on his face. She plucks them from his head with divining ease.

“I’m a problem you’d rather be done with.” It’s not a question when she says it like that.

 _Be done with_. They both know how she really means it.

Dread curdles in his gut. She had sounded almost hopeful when she said that.

“Not as such, no,” he tells her carefully, backing away.

“You don’t like me, though. As much as you want me, you don’t like me at all.”

“I’ve told you before that that’s not so.”

“How can you, when I treat you like this?”

“Like your plaything? Like your bit of fluff on the side?”

“Like my gravest sin.”

He recovers quickly. “How long are you going to lead dear old Stefan on? The truth will out, you know.”

She stares at him as she pushes herself away from him. “I thought this was the answer. The thing that might make me feel better. I don’t think it does.” She tries to move past him, but he won’t let her this time. Not yet. Her pulse is a little stronger than usual under his fingers. His instructions to the Donovan boy must have taken effect.

“What are you really saying, sweetheart?”

Finally, she looks away from him. “I think we should end this.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“This has gone too far.”

He draws her against him and folds her up into his arms. She sighs and collapses against his chest, unable to resist this any more than he is. He can feel her giving in to him, and when she finally lets down her guard, he bends to murmur in her ear, “We haven’t gone nearly far enough.”

 

 

 

For a little while longer, they walk this tight rope together.

 

 

 

And then, one night, Matt Donovan is rushed to the E.R. with a torn-out throat.

 

 

 

That night he glimpses her through her bedroom window. He has the impression that she has been sitting for long hours at the vanity, staring sightlessly into the mirror. There is dried blood on her chin.

He arrives in time to catch the tail-end of the Salvatore brothers’ argument, throwing blame in each other’s faces for the day everyone knew must come eventually. They leave, first Damon, in a storm, and then Stefan, looking resigned and suffering.

No sooner are they out of the way than he rings the bell, thrice. The younger Gilbert answers the door.

Elena’s brother quirks his brow at him. “Uh, is there a reason you’re here?”

“Invite me in.”

“Does that actually work?”

He’s distracted from making a convincing threat by Elena appearing at the top of the stairs. She looks like hell, worse now that he can see her properly. A shade just barely clinging to this side of the afterlife. 

“Invite him in, Jer.” Her voice, thin yet firm, brooks no countermand.

Jeremy Gilbert looks at her like she’s grown three heads, but he follows her direction well enough.

Finally, after a year of thwarted attempts, Klaus steps over the threshold into Elena Gilbert’s home.

He tosses what he thinks might pass for a friendly smile at Elena’s brother and offers no explanations as he follows Elena up to the top of the stairs. Thankfully, her brother displays astonishingly little curiosity toward him.

“Leave Jeremy out of whatever theatrics you’re no doubt here for and I’ll let you stay,” she tells him as soon as they set foot in her room.

He shuts the door behind them. Watches as she collapses onto her bed and fixes her blank gaze onto the ceiling.

He settles down next to her. She radiates heat in a way he associates with the most intimate, carnal embrace of her body.

“What grieves you?” he asks.

“I nearly killed Matt tonight,” she tells him, in an echo of another conversation, another lifetime.

He does not confess that he compelled the boy to do what he must to tempt her to feed.

“Yet you did not.”

“He’ll never look at me the same way again.”

“You could always compel him to forget about it.”

“I’m a monster,” she whispers. She sounds so lost. Too miserable to even cry—or, perhaps, too abstracted from her humanity. And yet, he feels certain that she has not turned her humanity off. No, it’s something more far-reaching, some draining away of her vitality by bits and trickles.

This girl was never meant to be a vampire. At least, not yet, not like this. She’s rejected the change, rejected the necessity by which she must feed to survive, and she is paying the terrible price.

Bitter acid, toward Stefan and toward his sister, rises up in him. He hates to see her so diminished, hates it with an intensity he had not anticipated.

“Leave Stefan. Come away with me.”

This catches her off-guard. “It’s not that simple,” she tells him, voice small and pleading. Not with him, he thinks. With the universe.

“Why not?”

She opens her mouth to respond. He doesn’t want her to voice whatever reasons she might have. Speaking them aloud might make them more real in her mind, might make them well-nigh impossible for him to overcome.

“It’s very simple, my dear one,” he cuts in, petting her hair away from her face. “Forget about this, and come away with me. We could leave tonight, if you wanted.”

“I couldn’t.”

“I want you, and I know you want me.”

“Don’t you see that that’s the problem? It’s tearing me apart.”

“Then let me take care of you.”

Elena looks so very, very tired. “I am so lost. I don’t know how I’ll ever find the way.” She tells him this like it’s her deepest confession.

 _I’m a problem you’d rather be done with_.

He wonders how long she’s been thinking that way. Wonders if their entire affair has been a slow-acting poison for her, a kind of suicide of which he had not realized he was a part.

She does not tell him yes or no. But she allows him to kiss the blood from the corners of her mouth. And after a while, she kisses him back, her lips moving very slowly and intently against his own.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! And please be sure not to skip chapter 7 (also posted today) if you are just checking the update!


	9. Chapter 9

 

 

 

He slips out of her bed at dawn. She sits up when he goes, and watches him set his clothing to straights. Impulsively, he ducks down to capture her lips in one last kiss before he goes.

 

 

 

In the end, it’s Elena who finally settles the issue over the Hunter for him. She cannot go on like this, living this unnatural half-life, unwilling to embrace her afterlife. That, and a stray comment that the Hunter finally lets slip.

Now that he is decided on a proper course, the necessary schemes to ensure the fruition of his goals spring fully formed into his thoughts. All of his intelligence gathering in Italy has come to naught, and he’s realized that a new approach will be necessary to yield the proper results. It takes almost nothing at all to start the wheels spinning, to goad his sister in certain hope that she will reveal some lost kernel of vital knowledge.

 

 

 

Is it folly to think that Elena would come to him that night? Perhaps, but he looks for her all the same.

 

 

 

Stefan is the one so kind so as to inform him that Elena has left on a college tour trip with the Bennett witch. She’s expected to be gone several days. Senior year in high school, and all of that.

She hadn’t said anything to him about this trip that whole night they’d spent together in her bed. He wonders if she would have, were she not so distressed.

The question brings up another line of speculation—of what Elena will do with herself once he restores her mortality to her. He cannot imagine himself her lover last fall, before she turned. Too much of what they are has been a primal response to each other’s essential vampiric natures. A human girl would want something mundane—a boyfriend, which he could never be. And yet, he does not want to give her up once he cures her. Perhaps he could convince her to put off college for a while yet, or to choose somewhere interesting abroad to study. All she’d have to do is say the word and he would get her in.

 

 

 

“I know there’s something going on between you and Elena,” Stefan tells him, apropos of absolutely nothing, after ambushing him in the study where he keeps the Hunter.

“Oh good, Stefan. Lovely of you to pop by. Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” He gestures to the rack that now dominates the space where his desk usually resides. “Spanish Inquisition, you know. Good craftsmanship is so hard to come by these days.”

Stefan shoots him a predictably annoyed look and tries again. “I’m not blind, Klaus.”

“Then by all means, we might as well hear what it is you think you’ve seen.” Klaus ushers him out into the hall and shuts the double doors behind him. Some conversations just aren’t suitable for a prisoner’s ears.

Stefan rounds on him as soon as they are in the hall.

“What’s your motive with Elena?”

“What motive could I possibly have? She’s a vampire now. Hardly useful anymore.”

“Exactly. Which is why I don’t get why you cured her in the first place. Why go to the effort? And why continue meeting with her, pulling her aside at every town function?”

“Steady. You almost sound like you’re accusing me of something.”

“Oh, no, don’t get the wrong idea. I _am_ accusing you of something. I know you’ve been fucking my girlfriend. And it turns out, I’ve got a free day, so I think the time’s come for you to tell me _why_. So,” and here, Stefan throws himself into a stuffed leather arm chair and drums his fingers against the arms with a touch of that old, manic, familiar energy, the sort that could affably tear a lung out, “Enlighten me.” Everyone always forgets that it was Stefan Salvatore who taught him how to dance on the tables, and not the other way around.

“You’re awfully calm for someone who’s discovered his love hasn’t been true to him.”

“Elena’s in a vulnerable state. You’re manipulating her.”

Klaus shrugs and pours himself a drink. “Perhaps I’ve taken a liking to her.”

“Let’s not play games. What do you get out of this?”

Klaus sits down across from him and leans forward. “You’re right, of course. I do have an ulterior motive. And, I think, the answer to all of your prayers.”

And thus, Stefan becomes the final, unwitting player in the next act of his production.

 

 

 

He and Rebekah reconcile. They have dinner, tell some old stories, procure Jeremy Gilbert’s aid, and snipe at each other as Stefan offers choice sardonic commentary. It’s like old times, really, and for a moment, Klaus regrets bringing his plans to dramatic climax.

A year ago, this very thing was all for which he had hoped.

But for Elena Gilbert he finds he often does things he could never have foreseen.  

 

 

 

He gets his answers, extracted along with an oath from Stefan over his sister’s desiccated body never to reveal their quest.

 

 

 

None of it matters. Elena Gilbert returns from her trip a different creature entirely.  

 

 

 

Leaving Jeremy Gilbert’s safe return and subsequent memory-wiping seems to Stefan seems like a sure way to get caught absconding with the boy by Elena, so Klaus personally oversees the process of putting everything back where he found it.

It’s because of this that he happens to overhear Elena with Damon Salvatore as she returns home from her trip, days early. He waits just inside the front door, listening like a thief in the night.

“When you tell me what it is a vampire’s supposed to be… I agree with you, Damon,” she tells him. Distress saturates her voice.

What _Damon_ tells her a vampire should be. She’s never once told him, not in all their many nights together, that she agrees with his own perspective. Which one really would think she would, since he quite literally has more experience on the subject than anyone else walking the earth.

“So what’s the problem?” Damon asks.

“It’s _killing me_.”

“Why? _Be a vampire, Elena_. It’s that simple.”

She takes a deep, audible breath. “Okay.”

Then—“What am I going to tell Stefan?”

“Do you need to tell him anything?”

 

 

 

She shows not a flicker of surprise to find him waiting for her when she gets inside.

“Why are you here?” she asks him as she throws her keys on the front table and hangs her coat up in the hall closet.

“You never mentioned you were leaving town.”

“Was I supposed to?” Her voice floats down the length of the entry hall from where she rummages around in that closet.

He prowls up behind her and spins her so she’s forced to look at him. He recoils. Her arm is hot to the touch.

“You’ve been feeding.”

And now that he looks at her, it’s so obvious that he feels shamed that he had not noticed it before. Fresh blood in her system has put roses in her cheeks and a dark, sharp sparkle back into her eyes. He is not used to her appearing thus without his blood or his body inside of her.

“Damon taught me to feed without hurting anyone,” she says.

He instantly resents her for choosing to let this lesser vampire persuade her to feed when he himself has not been able.

“Did I not offer you the same?”

She leans her head back and looks at him from under hooded eyes. He realizes, suddenly, how very close their bodies are to each other.

“You know that was never what you were offering me,” she tells him. Their bodies may be pressed intimately together, and yet, Elena Gilbert has never been further away than she is now. She’s not wearing the mask he’s seen her put on for her brother and her friends, nor the armor she so often dons for him, the armor whose chinks he has so relished slipping his arrows past to bury in her weak spots. This is some other distance that she has thrown up between them, some other camouflage, and he does not yet know how to slip around it.

He wants very much to kiss her, to wipe that foreboding, glacial patience from her face. She has never, not once, been able to hold herself apart from him during their passion plays. Inside, she is fire, and he need only stoke it.

Tenderly, he strokes her hair, slightly tacky with dried blood, out of her face.

“I’d offer you anything,” he replies, finally.

“What I want isn’t yours to offer. Not anymore.” She slips under his arm, and, for the first time he can ever recall, escapes him. He lets her, because, somehow, he does not think that he could stop her.

 

 

 

She doesn’t seek him out the next night, or the one after that, or the one after that.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know if you’e enjoying—thanks for reading!


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

 

His affair with Elena ends without any sort of formal dénouement.

 

 

 

Everything is different after she returns.

Not in the ways that would be obvious to the casual observer, but in all the ways that matter to him.

 

 

 

There’s a school dance, and with Caroline split from Tyler Lockwood, she asks him, somewhat shyly, if he would escort her.

A few months ago, he would have jumped for the opportunity to have the lovely Miss Forbes on his arm for an entire evening.

Now, he cannot help but think that if there is a school dance, then Elena must be there, and he will have the chance to set things straight between them.

He is right, at least in part.

No sooner does he escort Caroline in to the darkened school gym, transformed by white ribbons and silver festoons into a supposed winter wonderland, than he spots _her_ , at the center of the dance floor surrounded by reedy boys and coltish girls, fawning for her attention. She’s dressed in a daring white dress that plunges in the back all the way to her waist and shows off miles of long legs and acres of glowing, flushed skin. A few weeks of regular feeding has put weight back onto her body, filling out lush and tempting curves. Elena giggles, the sound sweet but sharp, and takes one of the girls by the hand, leading her off of the floor and out the back. That dress will show every last speckle.

Neither of the Salvatores are in attendance, but he’s not certain what that might signify.

Caroline notes his attention. “Don’t worry, she’s being careful,” she says. “She won’t risk us.”

“I thought she was averse to feeding from live donors.”

“She was afraid to. And we were afraid to let her try.” Which still doesn’t explain why no one had thought to bring her a bloodbag in all the months since Elena had turned.

“And you don’t think she runs the same risk now?” he asks, carefully.

Caroline looks at him gravely. “She has to sink or swim on her own at some point. And when she sinks… I’ll be there. We all will.” Because, at some point, all vampires make a mistake. He’s surprised by Caroline’s pragmatism.

A new song starts up, and Caroline loops her arms over his neck. “Dance with me,” she orders, coquettish and soft. He cannot possibly tell her no. She fits into his arms like a dream. It’s not enough to distract him from keeping an eye out for Elena’s safe return.

Return she does, finally, some three dances later. The other girl returns with her, swaying like she’s had too much to drink.  

“Let me get you some punch,” he tells Caroline, and doesn’t wait for her reply. Very quickly, he’s able to find Elena and pull her aside, into the shadows by the folded back bleachers.

“Where’s your date?” Elena asks him. Her breath smells like vodka.

“No doubt finding a way to make last minute improvisations to the décor. Why, does it bother you that I’m here with Caroline?”

“I think it’s for the best.” She glances over his shoulder, back toward the gaggle of teens. Looking for her next bite. There’s a faint red mark on her chin, but a casual observer would think she had simply smeared her lipstick. She hadn’t been wearing any lipstick earlier. Sure enough, a constellation of red flecks the shimmering white fabric over her bust.

“Let’s leave,” he suggests, ignoring her jab. “I’ll take you back to mine and I’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t need you to take care of me. I’m fine,” she tells him distractedly.

“It’s a clever trick, giving that girl you bit a nip from your flask, so everyone will think she’s just smashed, but it’s risky too. You have blood splattered all down the front of your dress. Anyone who cared to notice could see.” Then, in a softer tone, “I’m worried about you, my dear one.”

Elena glances back up into his face. Something unguarded flickers there, and his heart surges, triumphant. He has her now.

“Come away with me,” he coaxes her, repeating an earlier offer, meaning it for something more than just _come home with me._  

That remoteness he had noted before falls over her face. “Don’t you understand that I can’t? Not ever.”

She tries to brush past him, but he won’t let her. Not yet. He crowds her back against the wall.

“What’s changed? What did Damon Salvatore say to you?”

“It’s not Damon, Klaus. It’s you.”

He doesn’t understand. Can’t understand as she shoulders past him, as though he hadn’t meant anything at all to her.

“Is that it, then? You’re just going to walk away?”

She glances at him over her shoulder, tells him, bewilderingly, “I mean to go where you can never follow.”

There is no place he would not hunt her.

He watches as she grabs a cup of fruity punch from a passing classmate, begrudgingly admiring how she artfully trips and spills the red juice down the front of her dress, obscuring the bloodstains. She laughs and twirls through the crowd and finds another pretty girl to whisper with behind cupped hands. She’s a menace to the room. An irresistible lure. Lovely to watch. Deadly, maybe, in the right circumstances.

She never turns back, not even once, and it becomes unbearably clear that she does not intend to ever do so again. Their conversation feels more and more final the longer it sits with him. He feels outside of himself, a stranger to his past, when he finally turns away from that bright shining star that was Elena Gilbert.

“Where were you?” Caroline asks when he returns with her punch.

“Did you miss me?” he asks her with his most winning smile. Amazing how easy it is to play along despite the vast cavern he feels opening up within him.

She says something back, and he responds on automatic.

They dance and he gathers her in close and focuses on the feel of her in his arms. It doesn’t help.

For the rest of the night, he tries very hard not to think any more on Elena Gilbert. A mere two months ago, he was convinced that he was half in love with Caroline Forbes. It shouldn’t be so difficult to fall into the same folly again, even if he now fears he knows the difference.  

She rests her head against his chest and murmurs, “This is nice. It always feels right, when I’m dancing with you.”

“You’ve been in need of a proper partner.”

“Do you think that’s you? My friends wouldn’t think that.”

“I think that’s up to you, isn’t it?”

She looks up from beneath her lashes and bites her pretty pink lower lip. Her heart beats very fast in her chest. This should be enough.

“And what if I did say you were the right one? What then?”

He’s taken aback by this tack from her. “Do not play games with me, Miss Forbes. Cruelty doesn’t suit you.” Not the way it suits others.

She frowns at that, and doesn’t press him any further on the topic.

Their conversation turns to other things after that—his plans for the hybrids, mostly, what he will do with them now that he cannot make others, the upcoming Miss Mystic Falls pageant and where he might go if he chooses to leave. He thinks about inviting Caroline along when he does leave, because it’s becoming clearer and clearer to him as the night presses on that he _will leave_ , but he does not quite.

Not yet.

 

 

 

The next morning dawns gray and misty. It’s the first morning _After Elena_.

No, that is not right. The first morning was weeks ago. He just hadn’t known it for sure.

The first morning without her was probably the one and only when he’d awoken in her bedroom, encircled in her arms.

She’d fixed on him a strange, melancholy look, that had left him feeling exposed and restless. Hungry for her arms and her mouth and the way she looked at him with her eyes wide open.

He’d had her still, in that moment.

But then, he had risen from her bed, and kissed her farewell, and had not known how final their parting was to be.

 

 

 

That morning, he compels a human to slit the Hunter’s throat, then snaps the human’s neck. One of his hybrids buries the bodies in the woods out back.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading.


	11. Chapter 11

 

 

 

Weeks pass.

 

 

 

He stays in town.

Waiting.

For what—he’s not certain.

 

 

 

Ignoring Elena Gilbert has never been an easy task for him, but now it is utterly impossible. He notices her wheresoever he goes. At the edge of the crowd on the town green, her head tilted like a bird’s as she studies the milling throng. Spilling into and out of shops and coffee houses with Caroline or the Bennett witch or with teenagers he has never seen before, who smile too brightly and agree too readily, and, once, walking along the edge of the highway late at night, the moon behind her shoulder her only company. His girl and the moon, and what a lovely pair they make, he catches himself thinking before he reminds himself that she has inexplicably stopped being his girl, and that he has not found himself up to the task of reclaiming her.

 

 

 

He’s not sure what he was expecting from the much talked about Miss Mystic Falls Pageant. How he thought it could be in any way different from the innumerable other town soirees he has taken to attending with what he realizes in his most introspective moments is a nerve-wrecking level of enthusiasm.

When the girls come out for their dance, he tries to imagine what Elena had looked like the previous year.

He can’t.

It’s impossible to imagine her life this simple, this provincial. 

 

 

 

He can no longer remember what she had been like as a mortal.

 

 

 

What is even more impossible to imagine is the sight of Elena Gilbert as she is now, slipping through the crowd in a black lace cocktail dress, sleek and predatory. Gone is the ghost. To think she would embrace her vampiric nature so swiftly, so completely.

He cannot fathom it.

Cannot fathom her.

 

 

 

The news that she has ended things with Stefan as well reaches him just as he is about to leave.

There should be nothing particularly mysterious about Elena Gilbert throwing over calm, steady Stefan for his wilder, more charismatic brother. Except, it is not Elena’s way.

An ill feeling creeps over him.  

 

 

 

There’s a bar with a much less wholesome clientele than the Mystic Grill, strictly 21 and older. The entrance may face the same back alley as the one behind the Grill, but the two establishments are worlds apart.

He likes to come here, sometimes, because it is the closest which Mystic Falls can offer to the illicit comfort of a hole in the wall speakeasy. The bouncer guarding the entrance knows him well enough, and lets him through without the password.

Inside, the place is dark and crowded.

It should not surprise him that Elena has found her way into this one refuge, nor should it surprise him to find her at the epicenter of the chaos unfolding inside. Her body slithers between two human men, long and sinuous and sinful in its fluidity. She whispers something to one, licks the other’s throat, and ducks out of the way as the first one throws a mean looking left-cross at the second one’s face. His nose crunches, and blood sprays, and Elena saunters to the bar for a shot. She’s back before either of her marks realize she left their sides, fussing over the one with the broken nose and leading him off to get him cleaned up. Klaus orders a drink and waits. She doesn’t return with him.

Now that she’s embraced the change, Elena shows a real, intriguing streak of creativity for the hunt. That’s always been something he’s admired in a younger vampire. Anything to keep an eternity of inevitably successful hunts entertaining.

He watches her pull three more people—a college boy she makes out with before brazenly latching onto his neck, for all the world looking like a drunk girl giving an embarrassingly overworked hickey, and two girls who dance just a little too close to her—before he decides he’s had enough. If Elena means to make this her new stalking grounds, then he’s done with it.

Unexpectedly, Elena intercepts him at the door.

“Are you leaving?”

“You haven’t said a word to me in weeks,” he reminds her.

“I’m saying one to you now.” Her voice dips into a rougher register, low and husky and baiting. She had often sounded just this way right before he fucked her senseless.

He assesses her a bit more critically. Her pupils are blown, and a fine sheen of sweat glimmers on her skin. She licks her lips, and her mouth parts while she waits for him to respond. Her pulse hammers at her throat and her breasts, revealed by the plunging neckline of her gauzy blouse, heave with rapid breaths. There’s a subtle, musky scent to her that teases at the edges of his senses when she shifts her weight and presses her thighs together, and he cannot help looking at those long, tanned legs exposed by her miniskirt.

It hits him all at once. She’s high on blood, hot and bothered and out of her mind.

He could have her right now. One more time, to purge himself of any last remnant of her.

Silently, he grabs her by the arm and propels her through the door and out into the very same alley where this thing between them had originally begun.

She’s on him in an instant, mouth tearing at his own, hands shoving up under his shirt and nails clawing at his back. He yanks her flush against him and plunges his tongue into her mouth, needing to dominate her, to conquer her, to wipe the taste and feel of all others from her memory. Their legs tangle. He flips her around, presses her into the rough brick wall as he grinds into her. Her gossamer thin shirt shreds, and blood beads on her back, the smell of it urgent and cloying and mouth-watering. She growls against his mouth, and it’s all the encouragement he needs to lift her up so that she can wrap her legs around his waist. Swiftly, he rips her knickers off and plunges two fingers inside of her.

Elena is hot and slick and tight, and the memory of his time with her washes over him like a wave, the sort with a deadly undertow that could take him far, far out to sea if he is not careful. He breaks away from her ferocious kisses and leans his forehead against the crook of her neck and shoulder, breathing in the salt-smoke scent of her. He knows this body so well. Thought he knew her so well. She groans when he twists his fingers just so, and the insides of her thighs twitch against his hips, where his shirt has ridden up and they are pressed skin to skin. Impatiently, Elena seeks out his mouth again, and he feels that deadly current between them, sucking him back in. He knew she could be deadly under the right circumstances.

He can forgive her, he thinks, as her clever fingers work his belt and trousers open and her hand fists on his cock, working him with an edgy intensity. She nips at his throat but doesn’t break the skin, and his knees nearly give out. He’ll take her back and he can show her everything this world has to offer her. Everything he can offer her.

The thoughts are swirling madly through his head when he thrusts himself inside of her. He’s drunk on her, he knows. He’d been an idiot to ever think one more taste would satisfy him. Not when she’s moaning so prettily, not when her arms are wound tight around his neck and her kisses taste like salvation at hand.

Except that when he pulls back to look at her, she does not look back at him. Instead, she screws her eyes shut and leans back, against the wall, bracing herself against his shoulders as she bears down on him.

“Elena, look at me” he pants in her ear.

She doesn’t respond.

“ _Look at me_ ,” he urges, grabbing her by the jaw to force her.

Elena Gilbert looks down on him with a flat, empty predator’s regard. Everything he had so cherished in her is so far gone he cannot remember in that instant what had been so special about this.

And as he looks into her eyes, he has the sudden, lurching feeling that he has gotten this all wrong.

None of this is about him, or them, or anything that they had shared. For her, it’s not even a final goodbye tryst. _It’s not even that._ It’s worse. It’s so much less.

She’s high on blood and the thrill of the chase and she’d needed to get her leg over. He knows what it’s like, remembers the overpowering physical urges from his fledgling days. He’d been a fool to overlook those drives for the sake of _romance._ It could have been _anyone_ she’d dragged out into this alley. Could have been Damon Salvatore or that Matt or any one of her hapless victims tonight. He’d just been the convenient body willing to offer her that hard fuck against a wall without even waiting for a proper proposition.

White hot fury blinds him.

Somehow she has escaped him, driven herself as far away as she can go, to that place inside of herself where he cannot follow. The drive to wrench her back, to claim her and possess her so that she can never run from him again, rips through him like sheet lightning, burning out all other thoughts.

Elena twists her hips and tightens around him, and all the while looks at him like he is _nothing and he can’t stand it._ He wraps a tress of that long, gorgeous dark hair around his fist and uses it to yank her head back and bites down hard on her exposed throat. Elena Gilbert’s blood bursts onto his tongue. He barely has a taste before Elena twists out of his embrace. She staggers a few feet away from him, legs unsteady beneath her.  

“What the _fuck_?” She claps a hand over her neck and fumbles at the edges of the bite. When she pulls her hand away, the blood on the tips of her fingers transfixes her. “Why would you do that?” she asks shakily. There’s an edge of hysteria in her voice.

Klaus tongues at a stray drop of blood rolling over his lip. “If you lay down with wild things, dear, expect to get bitten.”

She splutters something, but he’s rapidly losing interest. He’d been a weak and sentimental fool to ever indulge her, and he had reaped the painful fruits of his follies. Now she would reap hers. He feels much better now. As though he can now look at all of this with a level of composure and measured perspective. Really, what did he think he was doing, engaging in this ill-starred love affair with Tatia Petrova’s needy spawn?

For the first time, it occurs to him that this isn’t just the same alley where she’d first led him out back. It’s also the same alley where this girl had helped destroy his brother. Tantamount to slaying a god, that had been. Would she be capable of the feat today? He doubts it. She’d been an inexplicable force of nature, once. For a little while, he had fallen under her spell. Had gone mad with desire for her. Now he sees that she really is just an ordinary girl, one of thousands to have died and transitioned young, in over her head and whining about it.

The bite still hasn’t closed. It will kill her if he doesn’t intervene. She tries to say something else to him.

He walks past her like she’s not even there.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter! Thanks for reading!


	12. Chapter 12

 

 

 

No one comes to fetch him.

No phone calls, no in-person pleas for a savior.

Not a single word from Elena herself.

A day passes, then another.

He checks his phone, hangs around town, making himself conspicuous. Still, nothing.

He spies Caroline leaving a coffee shop and engineers an encounter.

“And where is dear Elena this afternoon?” He glances toward the dark interior of the shop as though he thinks she might be within, although he knows from the lack of screaming that she is not. Vampires dying from werewolf venom all inevitably spiral into bloodlust eventually as their bodies push them to heal from what cannot be healed.

Caroline studies him, head cocked like a bird. “Why do you ask?”

Klaus shrugs. Gives her a bright, flirtatious smile. “Just trying to make conversation, love. Can you blame me for trying?”

Caroline frowns at him, but blushes gratifyingly. “I haven’t seen her. She was supposed to go on some big college trip 2.0 with Damon. You know, since the first one went _so well_ ,” she ends with a huff, rolling her eyes.  

He doesn’t analyze the way her words seem to attach themselves to a string in his chest, that tugs on something there, something he cannot— _must not must not_ — name or fathom.  

Klaus gives the conversation a couple of more minutes so as not to draw any suspicion before making some excuse or another and hurrying away.

Against all better judgment, he dials Elena. Her phone rings and rings and rings, with no answer.

He waits thirty seconds, then tries again. Again.

When this proves obviously futile—and really, the pathetic creature’s probably nearly dead by now, why would she answer her phone?—he does something which he is quite unwilling to analyze. He calls Damon Salvatore.

“What?”

“Is Elena with you?”

“Not that it’s any of your business, but she bailed—“

He hangs up and tries to think. No one knows she’s been bitten. If that’s the case, she must have slipped away before she started showing any symptoms. Where would the noble Elena Gilbert have gone, having abandoned all companionship to presumably die some anonymous death?

 _Far away from anyone she might hurt,_ his mind supplies, a careful strand of insight he hadn’t been aware he had.

Without any firm direction in mind, he takes off toward her house, rifling through all of those memories of all of those nights they had together. Surely, in all of that, she must have told him something of herself, must have revealed some secret place that meant something to her or to which she might gravitate in her hallucinations.

Obvious answers arise before him immediately.

The bridge where her parents died, where Stefan so succinctly pressured him into backing down last fall lest she face her mortality there again, where she ultimately _did_ go to a watery grave. He searches over the bridge, under it, all around it, and can find no trace of her presence.

Next he visits the graveyard, aware of her old, morbid propensities, her habit of visiting her parents’ gravesite and lying atop the wet grass there, arms spread out as though to embrace them through the soil, to join them. He’d seen her do this more than once when she’d still been living and he’d been keeping his careful watch over her, and though he has not caught her at this since, he cannot doubt that the venom burning through her body will have confused time and place and meaning for her.

Again, he has no luck.

 

 

 

She could be anywhere. Might have skipped town two nights ago, might be wasting away in the middle of the Mojave Desert for all he knows.

 

 

 

He checks his phone, but he has no missed calls.

 

 

 

How long can a vampire truly survive once bitten? Immune himself, he’s never bothered to really pay attention.

She could be dead already.

The thought twists inside of him, vicious as the blade through the heart that slew the innocent boy he’d once been ten centuries prior. 

 _No_ , she has to be somewhere. He tears through the woods on the outskirts of town, hopeful that she has simply wandered into the miles of familiar wilderness. The chances of finding her out here are slim, but he can’t think clearly. He calls her name and pushes onward, circling forward and back, until the sun begins to dip below the horizon.

 

 

 

The first stars glimmer from behind a canopy of black, swift night clouds when he finds her in a fateful clearing he wishes he had thought to check earlier.

The power of his relief at finding her still alive hammers him like a sapling battered by hurricane winds. 

He never would have guessed that she would return here, but he it is as he had said before. The venom can play strange tricks on the mind.

Elena kneels in the middle of a burnt out circle. Two other circles neighbor hers, their perimeters clearly visible, as all manner of green things have refused to grow in the past year. The scent of ash and primal magic lingers in the air here, even after all this time.

What this means, that she has returned to this their hallowed place, he does not dare speculate upon.

“Elena,” he calls, voice soft as a night bird’s call.

Instantly, she focuses in on him, her eyes glazed, feverish. She looks awful. The fever has taken her much farther than it did the last time she was so poisoned. Her skin has turned that waxen, tell-tale hue.

When he approaches her, she tries to stand, but her legs give out, and she would fall face first into the dirt and lingering soot if he did not catch her. She trembles in his arms like a wet calf.

Gently, he cups her cheek, and turns her face toward his.

“Go to hell,” she mumbles incoherently. Tears track down her face, and, as déjà vu bolts through him, he wonders if she’s trapped in memory of another night. It’s been a long time since she’s looked at him with so much naked feeling, and he cannot suppress his intrinsic response to her.  

“I’ll be elated to hear you tell me that when you’re well again, sweetheart.” When she is well, she will probably revert to her new persona. Probably pretend it meant nothing that she came _here_ , of all places.

He understands now that he would rather she go on like that, ignoring him and freezing him out, than for her to not go on at all.

He wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her against his chest. He lifts his spare arm and bites into his wrist, leaving a deep gash that will take plenty of time to heal, that will not require the least bit of effort from her in order to receive the necessary curative quantity. He offers her his bleeding wrist—

And, incredibly, she turns her head away.

“I don’t want you to save me,” she rasps weakly, stubbornly.

“Then I’m relieved the decision is out of your hands.”

She turns her face into his neck, and goes very, very still, a dead weight in his arms. He knows this weight, knows the feel of her limp corpse in his arms. For a wild moment, he thinks she’s passed that swiftly.

A cloud skates over the moon, casting everything to a dimmer darkness.

But then Elena shifts against him in the dark, and bares her throat. His bite is a thing of horrors. It’s festered, the skin bubbling and held together only by a loose viscous membrane, and spread up the side of her neck all the way to her ear and down under her collar.

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” she mumbles. Her focus slips, and she tumbles back into the past. “The bargain…”

The bargain he had broken once already, when he’d capriciously turned her aunt. He can’t remember why he did that now.

“No one is going to die,” he assures her. He presses his bloody wrist to her beautiful, obstinate mouth, still refusing this chance to save herself. Inspiration strikes him. “It’s part of the ritual,” he tells her, playing along with her delirium. “You have to drink or it won’t work.”

She frowns, either in consideration or because she can barely hold on to even this thread of reason.

He holds his breath while he waits for primal instinct to take over. When her fangs latch to his wrist and slice the half-healed mark back open, Klaus allows himself his first real smile since she walked away from him.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, rubbing slow circles against her back. Her color improves with every mouthful she takes from him, and her skin begins to warm. The pull between them strengthens as she feeds from him. He’s not sure what he’ll say to her when this is over—but he knows he will have to say _something_. Possibilities race through his mind, each with their potential slings and arrows.

Suddenly, Elena freezes mid-swallow and scrambles out of his arms.

He expects that she is well enough now to take account of her surroundings, of who her savior is.

The expression on her face as she wheels to face him is one of wretched disgust.

Klaus opens his mouth to cut her off, to say the first cruel word, when she turns around and vomits up the content of her stomach. An astonishing amount of blood and gore splashes onto the ground at her feet, and Elena continues to heave for several moments after the last of it has come up. Afterwards, she remains hunched over her knees, her fingers clawing trenches in the dirt and grass before her. It’s all very melodramatic.

“What was that?” he asks, angrily. “Do I disgust you so much?”

Careful not to step in her mess, he edges closer to her and kneels down, ready to drag her to her feet for an argument. Except, when he touches her, he realizes something is wrong. Sweat pops from her pores, and her color rapidly deteriorates again.

Foreboding washes through him. He’s misjudged the situation. She hasn’t forced herself to throw up _some_ of his blood in disgust. She’s thrown up all of it.

“You’ve thrown up the cure, sweetheart,” he tells her, needlessly. “We need to try again.”    

Elena looks up at him and shakes her head. “I can’t take it anymore,” she tells him pitifully. “ _I can’t take it anymore. It’s killing me.”_ Fresh tears stream down her face, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them away or do anything other than look at him.

She’s said that before. Standing outside her house, in a scene of which he had been so jealous at the time.

It has an ominous, desperate ring to it that he had not taken seriously enough then, but takes terribly serious now.

He takes her back into his arms and moves her away from the mess. Away from the circles that compound his growing suspicions. She clings to him, burrows into his chest as though he is her sole refuge in all the world.

“Please, Klaus,” she whispers. And then she begins to beg through her tears, her words so rapid and broken they are only barely intelligible. “Klaus, I want you to kill me. _Please, please._ Damon told me to be a vampire and I’ve been trying but _I don’t want to be this thing anymore, it’s killing me_. _Please!_ ”

He cannot bring himself to give her what she wants. Not like this.

“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be,” he assures her. “Let me cure you, and we can talk about this after.” Empty platitudes, but she seems to listen. He pets her hair and waits until she quietens. He can feel the fight draining from her as the venom respreads through her body.

This time, when he gives her his blood, she reluctantly accepts, only to gag and heave it back up immediately. It spills over their arms and onto their chests in a wet gush. Elena trembles violently against him.

“Damnit, stop fighting me, Elena!”

“I’m not,” she gasps. She screws her eyes shut and swallows thickly. “I can’t keep it down,” she admits.

“It’s psychosomatic. You just have to fight the nausea until your body has time to heal enough for it to pass.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What can I possibly not understand?” he snaps. No sooner does he say the words than terrible insight flashes through him. He thinks about her wasting away before his very eyes, all those times he wondered and wondered and never really _considered_ why Elena had been left to nearly starve to death. Why it had been allowed to get to a point where her bloodlust would trip her into his arms.

This time, he takes it very slowly with her. Gives her just the smallest trickle from the palm of his hand, and waits with her while she fights to hold it down. She sinks to her knees and he whispers in her ear, encouraging her, determined for her to beat this. They go through this process several times, until her color starts to improve, and, when he is finally satisfied, he asks her, deathly quiet, “How long has this been going on?” They are sprawled together on the rocky ground, in an almost intimate embrace.

Elena takes her time to answer. Now that she is lucid again, she is much less forthcoming with him. He can literally see her scrambling to put that stone wall up between them again. Trying—and not quite having the energy to succeed. For a moment, she tenses, and he thinks she intends to leave without answering. Eventually, though, she settles back against him, her back to his chest, and looks out over the clearing where a year ago he had claimed her life. A pale spring moon suffuses everything in silvery light. “Always. Since I turned,” she admits at last.

He frowns down at her. “Surely you must be able to keep some blood down—“

“Only human blood directly from the vein,” she tells him with a factuality that lets him know she is sick with misery about it.

“What about bloodbags?”

“I already told you. It _has_ to be from the vein. Everything else—“ She makes a brief, illustrative gesture.   

He appraises her sharply. “But that would mean you can’t keep my blood down, either.”

“I can’t.”

The news shouldn’t hit him so very hard, but it does nonetheless. So much for taking care of her. “Then why come to me at all?”

“I wasn’t coming to you for the blood. Or—it wasn’t because I was hungry.”

“Then why?”

“Complicated reasons. Reasons that don’t apply anymore.”

“You’re not very fair to me.”

“Since when did equity ever enter into this?”

“Ah. Then I suppose…all is fair in love and war.”

The words hang between them, invisible and yet oh, so heavy.

“Exactly,” Elena says, before pushing him away. “I meant what I said, earlier,” she tells him, gravely, once she is on her feet. “I want to die.”

“I won’t allow it,” he tells her, pouring every ounce of menace he feels in his ancient bones into those words as he shoots to his feet to tower over her.

Elena looks up into his face. “You can’t stop me from seeking death where I will, Klaus. Not really.”

“I can.”

She pins him with a pitying look. “You are truly immortal, but I am not.”

_I mean to go where you can never follow._

And she has been trying. Chasing down death, pushing away first him and then Stefan, hunting in public, daring someone to catch her out and stake her, setting out into the woods to purposefully succumb to his bite when all she ever had to do to save herself was to ask for his help.

He grabs hold of her shoulders, desperately afraid, of a sudden, that if he lets her leave now then she will just find some other way to die and leave him forever. To go where he truly will never be able to follow her. He knows now that in so doing she would curse him as truly as his own mother had once done. Worse. For there would never be a way to break her curse of a world without her in it.

“I don’t understand where all of this is coming from,” he tells her desperately.

This ignites her. “Damon said to _be a vampire_ and so I am, and that means _hurting people_ , and always just _barely_ pulling back before I really kill someone—I told him it would destroy me and it is! _It’s tearing my heart out to do this._ ”

“What does Damon Salvatore have to do with this?” he asks her slowly.

She blinks up at him, perplexed. “What?”

“Damon Salvatore. You said you’ve thrown yourself into this abyss on his advice. Why?”

She frowns. “He wants what’s best for me.”

“What else does Damon say?”

“What do you mean?”

“Does he have any other words of wisdom? Tell me, what is his philosophy on feeding?”

Elena’s mouth falls open. Slowly, she tells him, as though trying to piece it together herself, “He thinks I need human blood to survive. He was against the bunny diet from the start.” 

“He told you this?”

She nods. 

“And let me guess—he suggests feeding solely from a live victim, yes?”

“So?”  

Fury lances through him. It’s been a night for revelations, but this latest takes the prize. “Oh, you see, you _would_ be sired to him.” It’s terribly funny, really. He _would_ make a fool of himself over a girl ensnared to another’s whims. His sister had always told him he would get his just desserts over the sired hybrids.

Elena dismisses this immediately. “That’s ridiculous.” It’s not. Not at all.

He’s going to tear Damon Salvatore’s still beating heart from his chest the next time he sees him.

She resumes trying to twist out from under his grasp, out into the night, out into the abyss. He will not let her.

A new thought strikes him. “Was Damon Salvatore the one who told you to stop seeing me?”

Elena, to this point struggling ineffectually against his hold on her, pauses. “What? No. He doesn’t know about that.”  

Klaus resists informing her that Stefan definitely _did_. “Then why?”

“Because you were in love with me, okay?”

Once the words are said, there is no taking them back. “And that was so repulsive to you.”

Elena squeezes her eyes shut. “No. It wasn’t. That was the problem.” She tries again to free herself, and this time he lets her. She doesn’t run away like he assumed she would, instead pacing and running her hands through her hair. “Look, Klaus, I was in a really bad place when that whatever-it-was between us started. I was looking for a way out.” Poisoning herself with him, just as he had feared. “And then… And then before I knew it, I realized that things had changed. I cared about you, and I didn’t want you involved. Because I had decided I needed to find a different way out.” To die, she means, since it had apparently become clear to her that he wouldn’t do the job for her, not anymore, but he can’t bring himself to correct her. “So, I’m sorry. I really am.” She turns to go.

When she leaves, this will truly be the end. Now that she’s tasted death so near, he knows she will not stop searching for it until she attains it for true.  

He has one final card to offer.

“Come to Italy with me.”

She doesn’t look back when she responds, “You’ve already offered me that. I can’t.”

“If you do, I’ll make you human again.”  

She pauses. “We tried that when I was in transition,” she tells him without turning around to face him. He can hear the dull glimmer of longing in her voice.  

“No, not whatever dark magic your friend might have tried. I’m saying that there’s a cure. I’ll find it for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not made out for this. I’ve been searching for it all spring. I wanted to spare you this pain, as much as I seem to have failed utterly.”

Stubbornly, she shakes her head. “I can’t. That’s not a solution. I have to be a vampire.”

Frustration roils through his veins. “That’s the sire bond talking! Take the cure, you’ll be freed from the damned bond, and you can return to your merry little life.”

“You mean, take the cure, and I’ll be human and you’ll be able to make hybrids again.”

“Are you really going to get stuck on that little detail?”

“I’ll still have done all of the terrible things that I’ve done as a vampire. You can’t just undo that.”

“Did anyone die? Was any of the damage permanent?”

He takes her lack of response to mean _no_ to both of his questions.

“Come to Italy with me.”

Finally, she turns around to face him. There’s an expression on her face he’s never seen before. Hope. But also, something else—the shadow. “I’m afraid,” she says.

“Don’t be. You’re going to be alright. I swear it.”

He’s a moonstruck fool for saying it. He expects her to rebuff him as she has so easily as of late, but instead, the words seem to sink beneath her skin.

“Say I did take the cure. What would that mean?”

“Anything you wanted it to. You could go to college, perhaps, or I could take you to Mozambique and you could work on your tan and swim under the full moon.”

Elena dances on the edge of indecision. “You make it sound so easy.” She _wants_ to give in to him, just as she wants to escape into oblivion.

He dares to reach for her, before she can pull away again. “It is so easy,” he says, and spools her back into his embrace.

Tentatively, Elena leans her head against his chest and wraps her arms around his waist.

“I don’t know what to do about you,” she says. “I’ve already tried turning you out, but you keep coming back to me.”

“Haven’t you heard? I’m persistent as the Devil.”

“It would be different, though, if I were human. I don’t think you’ll want a mortal girlfriend.”

“I’ll want you howsoever you are. And, if in a few years’ time, should you decide that mortal life is not for you after all… I’ll turn you. Properly.” He rather likes this idea, actually. And if her feelings for him result in a second sire bond… Then they will cross that bridge when they come to it.  

She shakes her head. “This is all a moot point. I have to be a vampire. I can’t take the cure.” She’s going round in circles, unable to quit her fixation on Damon Salvatore’s flippant instructions.

“Fine, then be a vampire. Come away to Italy and be a vampire with me. I’ll look after you, and make sure you don’t harm anyone. Does that sound like a deal?” She’ll thank him for bundling her off once he finds the cure for her.

“You’re asking me to be very selfish.”

“I am.”

“To leave behind everyone who depends on me.”

“Only for a little while. While you get your head together.”

He lets her think it out, and together they watch the stars blaze over their clearing.

“Okay,” she tells him at last.

“Okay?”

Elena looks up at him, with those dark, serious eyes that could drown a man. “It would be better for you if you didn’t love me. I’m only going to lead you to more pain and misery.”

“But you love me back.”

She doesn’t deny it. “I think that’s pain and misery enough for both of us, then.”

He does not deny that, either.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who’s read and commented! I appreciate you all! 
> 
> I’ll be back soon with a few more entries for Power Plays and then the next installment for Fairytale Ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Hmm so this isn’t actually the fun holiday project I hinted at last week, this is the angst that I started writing instead. The other project is still to come, and will probably start arriving the moment this is finished. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. More to come tomorrow.


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